Antisemitism

What it is, what it isn’t, and where it shows up.

Every Day Is Holocaust Remembrance Day

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Every day is Holocaust remembrance day.

We live in an indelibly post-Auschwitz world. There is no going back.

Auschwitz proved the depths to which man may sink if he rejects the image of God in his fellow man.

Revealed the abyss that gapes under the vaulted ceilings of modern civilizational achievement.

Demonstrated that the raucous call of blood and soil will easily drown out the thin still voice of the human soul.

Auschwitz showed us all these things and more, our worst reflection in a black mirror of entirely human horror.

Those who truly understand what Auschwitz was, can never forget what Auschwitz means. The warning its memory carries is real, tangible, and as inescapable as divine fire in our bones. It is a permanent part of our psyche and a nightmare against which we judge our waking world.

But there is more to living in a post-Auschwitz world, each and every day.

We must remember: there were many reasons the Nazis marshalled entire nation-states in their special quest to eradicate the Jewish people specifically, beyond their general quest to eliminate all possible alternatives to their ethnic monoculture. Many reasons for their obsessive hatred of us – political, economic, social, historical. Take your pick, believe them all if you like. But there stands an overarching reason, an underlying principle of the comprehensively anti-Jewish ideology they professed: regardless of where any one of us casts his or her lot, we inevitably stand together for the Difference – the alternate, the strange, the wondrous, the Ineffable – that lies at the heart of a humanity created in the image of its Creator, and that threatens the Nazi worldview, and the broken personality that seeks refuge from its brokenness in that worldview, to its very core.

This is but one of the many lessons we carry with us, post-Auschwitz: the knowledge of what it is that Nazis truly hate, in us and in the world.

This year, with the open popular resurgence of neonazism across the USA and Europe and with its embrasure by many supporters, apparatchiks, and even prominent members of the party led by POTUS, perfunctorily observing an international day of Holocaust “remembrance” feels like a cheap joke, at best (at worst, it proved to actually be an opportunity for publicly spreading anti-Jewish blood libels, as was seen in some locations).

So I invite you to take time on this day – and every day – to remember Auschwitz, remember the depths lurking under our feet as a race, but also to remember, love, promote, and protect the divine image within us all that Nazis work so very hard to destroy.

Be the Difference.

How Fascist Rhetoric Works

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Morning musing (extremely controversial, yes, but read the whole thing carefully):

I don’t follow the news cycle religiously or play the partisan political game/culture war currently strangling American political discourse. I mostly follow the news at a distance, do my research when necessary, and form an opinion from the highest vantage point I can reach.

That said, upon careful review, the inaugural speech he gave and the executive orders the POTUS signed upon entering the Oval Office seem much like everything else he does in the White House: an assortment of White Nationalist, Christian fundamentalist, and corrupt oligarchic moves, engineered by his neoreactionary funders and advisors to turn the USA into a white nationalist Christo-fascist colonizing megastate dominating the north western hemisphere and sharing multipolar geopolitical power with its Russian, Iranian, and Chinese frenemies – interwoven with many innocuous and cliched decisions and pronouncements that are, honestly, hard to object to in their banality, common sense obviousness, and/or practical irrelevance.

This is how fascist rhetoric works: It covers the true agenda, which is carried out in broad daylight, behind an obfuscating mask of patriotism, populism, and plausible deniability. Supporters are duped by the mask, but critics fatally stumble in ignoring the mask.

The popular Leftist reaction to the current POTUS – treating everything he says and does as an outrageous sin – is completely ineffective against the rise of racialized neo-fascism in America, as demonstrated by the failure to erode his populist base and prevent him from entering a second term. People are not convinced by hysterics and, with so much mud in the waters (amply supplied by the above mentioned frenemies and poured across the media networks owned by the administration and its cronies), can not differentiate between the real and the reactionary criticism.

That is a real problem that requires a complete shift in rhetorical approach, not more of the same triggered outrage. Critics, dissenters, and resisters of the current trend need to Level Up and make targeted, unassailable, and effective moves – not keep playing into the hands of bad actors who have steadily advanced their agenda while their opponents subject each other to endless purity tests.

I don’t know for sure what the next four years will bring. I could be wrong about everything I see and what I think it means for the USA and the world, and above all I believe that it is in the hands of the Heavens. But I do think that the choice is left to us – and we need to make effective, strategic choices, especially when the stakes are increasing.

Musk’s Holocaust Jokes

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Surprise surprise Musk followed up his dogwhistle at the inauguration with more White Supremacist Twitter content. Holocaust jokes, this time.

Greenblatt and ADL condemned his Nazi BS, btw.

🤷

Pick Your Shots

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Among many other things, Elon Musk is a white supremacist and a white collar fascist. There will be so many times to call him out, with incontrovertible receipts, over the coming weeks and months, that coming hard at the ADL for not immediately throwing the book at him for what could easily be shrugged off as just an excited wave 🙄 from an awkward and unlikable government official, doesn’t make sense in terms of good praxis.

The name of the game is pick your shots and don’t miss.

Keep Your Eye on the Ball

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“Somehow the story of yesterday end up being “what was that gesture?” and not “all the J6 insurrectionists were pardoned.”

I know we like to fight about signification, but there’s nothing to interpret when a felon wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt gets pardoned.”

h/t David Zvi Kalman

Keep your eye on the ball.

Grace for Elon

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Re: ADL’s response – I mean, what are you gonna do, call Elon Musk a Nazi on Inauguration Day?

Who knows what Musk meant to do – we saw what we saw. But you gotta know when to have a little grace, and I don’t see why the ADL should’ve responded differently.

Four Assorted Thoughts

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Assorted thoughts:

1) Abraham abinu and Sara immenu had to become immigrants before being brought into a covenant with the Creator. Moshe rabbenu had to become a foreigner in a foreign land before being sent as an emissary of the Creator. The children of Yisrael had to become (mistreated) immigrants and be given a Tora that repeatedly demands compassion and even charity for immigrants, before the Creator gave them a promised land in which to dwell securely. This is all very suggestive to me of a deeper dimension to the tension between natives and immigrants in human society.

2) Fundamentalism causes many problems in the world. Humanism solves many problems in the world. The problem is that both do so in the name of religion (as well as secularly, but that’s not as big of an issue). The problem is compounded by the fact that, due to their mental state, fundamentalists are louder and more power-hungry. Despite the advantages of their worldview, humanists are at a disadvantage in resisting the tide of fundamentalism that has drowned humanity for thousands of years.

3) Antisemitism is the oldest of the modern prejudices, and while it shares much in common with other veins of bigotry it is as unique as the people of Yisrael are unique. The refusal of the Jew to accept the violence at the basis of imperialist “civilization” and “culture” – the insistence on preferring, even in the smallest part, the remaining vestiges of an alternative civilization and culture – ultimately marks him as anathema to “civilized” society, no matter how much he assimilates or seeks his place in the imperial pyramid of social privilege. This has held true for the Jewish people across Christian and Islamic lands alike, to this very day. But it is not enough to simply react to the fact of antisemitism: The ever-present challenge is to avoid internalizing the worldview and values of the antisemite, in both the diaspora and our homeland.

4) Reminder to myself: Nothing has a single cause and not every cause is linear. “Train your tongue to say I don’t know.” And just choose the good because it is good, so that there will be more good in the world.

Israel’s ‘Warmongering’

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“Israel’s warmongering”

[sic]

🤢🙄🫠

Otherwise educated, intelligent, moral individuals really out here claiming that Israel is the aggressor.

On the Hebrew anniversary of Hamas’s invasion no less.