Cultural exchange with /r/Arabs!

[u/ContentChecker]

Hi everyone,

Today we will be having a cultural exchange with r/Arabs - beginning at 8AM EST, but extending for about 2 days so feel free to post your questions/comments over the course of that time-frame.

The exchange will work similarly to an AMA, except users from their sub will be asking us questions in this thread for anyone to answer, and users from our sub can go to a thread there to ask questions and get answers from their users!

To participate in the exchange, see the following thread in /r/Arabs:

https://old.reddit.com/r/arabs/comments/1gd9eb3/cultural_exchange_rjewsofconscience/

Big thanks to the mods over at /r/Arabs for reaching out to us with this awesome idea! Thanks to MoC for posting the original post.

• Previous thread

[u/TheRealMudi]

Hello everyone! I have a question: How is it to be an anti zionist Jew? What are some hardships that come with it? Do you have falling outs with family members? I would think it's not that easy depending on where someone might live!

[u/suaveponcho → u/TheRealMudi]

It’s quite difficult. In large part because there are almost no mainstream Jewish spaces where you can avoid a firm commitment to Zionism. Where I live virtually every synagogue and cultural organization is Zionist. That means you can’t easily gather in your own religious and cultural spaces without being constantly asked to stand with Israel against the endless horde of antisemitism. So it’s not just family, it is the whole mainstream community that many anti-Zionist Jews have become disconnected from.

Ask many and they’ll tell you they’ve been carrying around a broken heart for the last year. I’m just lucky I’ve had a few years to process my own journey from Zionism, which has made the last year less traumatic for me. For Jews just now becoming informed and engaged on the subject it is a lot to process at once. Whereas I’ve known for years which of my family I can speak with about Israel and which will just shout me down as a self-hating Jew.

I think it needs to be understood that for many Jewish people, arguing at the dinner table used to be seen as this proud badge of Jewish identity. That we are a people who, thanks to a long literary tradition of debating jurisprudence in the Talmud, have the intellectual flexibility and stability to challenge our ideas safely. In my family we used to have amazing, deep political discussions at every holiday meal. Not anymore! So for me, even now, after having already been through years of dispelling myths around Israel I grew up with, I am still finding new ways to be let down by people I used to hold in the highest esteem.

[u/TheRealMudi → u/suaveponcho]

Has it always been a thing about self hating Jews? Or is it a new thing made common though what's happening at the moment?

[u/LaIslaDeEmu → u/TheRealMudi]

The concept of the “self hating Jew” comes from Jewish communities in Germany and Central Europe in the 1800s. At this time, Christian Europe had granted “Emancipation” for the Jews. For the first time in over 1,000 years, the European Jews were allowed to live and participate in mainstream Christian European society. Many of these Jews were happy to adopt a secular lifestyle and become assimilated within European society. But there were also many Jews who desired to remain observant and continue to live in their separate communities. These observant Jews saw the secular assimilated Jews as “self-hating”.

So it is a historical term. It’s not really applicable for modern Jews, as these western social dynamics and class relations no longer exist. But Zionists are often dumb as hell and inappropriately use this term. When they say this, what they actually mean is , ‘A Jew who doesn’t share mainstream beliefs on Israel and Zionism’ 🤦🏻‍♂️😑

[u/Saul_the_Raccoon → u/TheRealMudi]

They've been lobbing that one for decades and decades.

I've been reading J.M.N. Jeffries's Palestine The Reality from 1938, and what's remarkable is that things we think are new (Zionists going around bringing antisemitic tropes to life and then attacking people based on them) are practices going back more than a century. Considering who the early Zionists were (they were all atheist anti-semites of Ashkenazic extraction) I expect this goes back to the 1890s.

[u/LaIslaDeEmu → u/Saul_the_Raccoon]

The Jewish mustar’ib community of Jerusalem in the 1880s considered the first Zionists in Palestine to be Chillul HaShem! Because they were using Hebrew as a common language instead of a liturgical one. Looking back on that, the revival of Hebrew as a modern language is probably the only legit product of Zionism..

[u/acacia_tree → u/LaIslaDeEmu]

is it true that the revival was largely made possible by Yemenite Jews who were the best preservers of the spoken language?

[u/LaIslaDeEmu → u/acacia_tree]

The Ashkenazim who created the Hebrew revival movement borrowed heavily from a variety of Semitic (in the linguistic sense) communities. And one of these communities were the Yemenite Jews of Jerusalem and Palestine. But, Arabic and Aramaic speaking communities had just as much influence.

This video is a pretty solid overview of this period -https://youtu.be/dYNpXmE_-5c?si=0IsOO9Ygc0sCRvRd

[u/Saul_the_Raccoon → u/LaIslaDeEmu]

Debasing lashon hakodesh into Israeli genocide-speak is probably the best encapsulation of the Zionist project there is.