Oh, I think it is definitely used as a tool. There are a lot of things that make me uneasy about Jewish culture (outside of the religion), the biggest being the fact that it's largely based on victimization and privilege as a result of that victimization
Um, whoa.
Maybe I'm misreading or you're not aware of how you're coming across here, but declaring that an ethnic group's entire culture is "largely based on victimization and privilege as a result of that victimization" ... I'm having a hard time finding suitable words here.
Not to mention calling on some very old anti-Semitic stereotypes: those whiny "manipulative" Jews who secretly have way too much power.
If you're talking about the specific rhetorical use of the Holocaust to defend everything the government of Israel does -- no, I'm not cool with that either. Amazingly enough, individual people of Jewish heritage have a wide range of individual opinions.
(I'm not cool with the rhetorical use of 9/11 to defend everything George Bush's government does, for that matter, but I doubt people would be happy if I claimed that "American culture" -- or "Christian culture" or "white culture" -- was largely based on this and proceeded to dismiss and denigrate all Americans -- or Christians, or white people -- as a result).
Making this sort of insulting stereotypical generalization about an entire ethnic group and its culture -- that is "frankly racist".
Thank you for coming to this post an commenting; it means a lot to me to see other people doing this.
I also want to say from the outset that no one owns history: it is our common property as human beings, and as such we bear responsibilities to it, chief among which is not to tell lies about it.
In this discussion that you're having above, I see two possibilities.
One thing is that there is a discussion within the Jewish community about how we memorialize the Shoah and its victims, and how central that memory is or should be to Jewish experience. On the one hand, there is the sense that as a religion and a culture, Judaism is focused on life and on the living, and that the insertion of some kind of "cult of martyrs" is alien and, frankly, Christianizing. On the other is the inescapable and unimaginable scale of the loss to our community, and the need to recognize and mourn that loss.
The other -- and what may be going on here -- is the "if only the Jews would stop whining about the Holocaust!" trope. In some circles this is a perfectly acceptable thing to say; it may at times be linked to some residual sense of ancestral guilt (rather like the way some white Americans will say, "if only those black people would stop whining about slavery!") It is also not uncommonly a backhanded way of criticizing the state of Israel. I am not entirely sure of the logic here, but it appears to be something like, "those Jews use the Holocaust to justify whatever Israel does -- we want to criticize Israel and so we also have to criticize the way Jews talk about the Holocaust." I am not entirely sure that the one follows on the other, myself. I think this is one specific point where criticism of Israeli politics slides into anti-semitism.
One sometimes gets the sense that people are jealous of what happened, and I do not understand this at all.
I am engaging with you here, rather than the OP, because I want to have this background here in the comments to this post. And I wanted to thank you for being willing to speak out here.
I think this is one specific point where criticism of Israeli politics slides into anti-semitism.
Yes. And on one hand, I wince at the idea (which I have seen crop up sometimes) that any criticism of the actions of the Israeli government is de facto anti-Semitic. Especially when some of those criticisms are coming from Israelis and other Jews.
But is some criticism of Israel deeply, deeply anti-Semitic? Hell yeah (and I'm sorry if I didn't make it clear that I think that).
And I wanted to thank you for being willing to speak out here.
No thanks required; I'm partly Jewish, so this hits me on a fairly personal level.
One sometimes gets the sense that people are jealous of what happened, and I do not understand this at all.
Some people *are* jealous, and I will take a stab at explaining it. It's kind of like the appeal of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (bear with me, here): the circumstances of Buffy's life perfectly justify the kinds of oversized emotions that *all* teenagers feel. No one can call Buffy emo -- she slept with her boyfriend once, and he lost his soul and tried to kill her!
Similarly, I think a lot of people who feel lost and rootless, ignored and marginalized, would like to have something like the Holocaust or slavery in their family history -- something that *everyone* knows about, something that is generally acknowledged to be a source of real sadness, loss, and persecution. Suffering like that is a mark of distinction.
No one wants to live through it themselves. No one looks through their family tree and says "Sorry, Aunt Ida and Uncle Bob, you're the ones I'm going to sacrifice to the Nazis in my fantasy of suffering." No -- they just imagine nebulous lost relatives, people who never were. Just enough to justify the sadness they *already* feel, not enough to cause real, aching grief.
There are a lot of things that make me uneasy about Jewish culture (outside of the religion), the biggest being the fact that it's largely based on victimization and privilege as a result of that victimization, which is manipulative and, quite frankly, racist -- there's this idea that your membership in a particular race/religion alone entitles you to something -- and also kind of irrelevant at this point.
Wow. In one fell swoop, you claim that
1) the linchpin of Jewish culture is victimization and privelege
2) Which is used for gain and sympathy
3) so Jewish culture is based on racism, greed, and entitlement.
I believe that one of the major definitions of prejudice is attributing negative characteristics to an entire group, and on that basis, that is the most blatantly prejudiced single statement I've read all week. And believe me, it had competetition.
Also, it's pretty low to say, "Come on! Get over that genocide already!"
First of all, I'm sorry about the generalization -- I tend to forget my "some"s and "parts of"s when talking about groups or cultures.
I'm actually not talking about Israel, I'm talking more from personal experience -- the things that I have been told by Jewish friends and family members about what is allowed and not allowed, what is okay to do and not okay to do. For instance, I was really shocked when I was talking to several of my awesome, otherwise open-minded friends and they said they were vehemently opposed to interracial and interfaith marriages, and would discriminate against interracial/interfaith couples. I asked why, and they told me, I kid you not, that because of past persecution "Jews have to make more Jews." I was like, "Srsly?" and thought maybe it was just them -- so I polled Jewish friends and family members and found that, yeah, pretty much everybody felt the same way. That was really, really shocking to me, and experiences like that -- it just seems to me that, yes, the Holocaust does get used as a tool to justify things that otherwise wouldn't be acceptable. I'm not talking on a grand sociopolitical scale, I'm talking on a purely cultural, what-we-are-taught-to-believe kind of scale. It gets used the same way Catholics (er, some Catholics) use their religion to pass down some unbelievably offensive beliefs. Does it make more sense to you now? Do you understand, between this and my other posts, why I just think it's harmful to everbody for one group to lean so heavily on one part of history? I'm not trying to be like, "Jews suck for doing this!" because I think it's true of a lot of other groups and a lot of other historical events, and I think it's harmful every single time -- it just happens to be that this was the group and the event that got brought up.
(I agree about 9/11 -- in fact, I was going to use 9/11 as an analagous situation, because I think we as a nation are doing the same thing in an even more dangerous way -- but I probably wouldn't bat an eye at your wording it that way, to be honest, because I tend to take it for granted that when people say "Christian culture" or "white culture" or whatever, they don't literally mean every Christian person or every white person. Maybe I shouldn't -- maybe I should have started some arguments about it in the past -- but I tend to let that slide.)
Hi, I'm a Jew and I know lots of Jews. I don't know a single one who opposes interfaith or interracial marriages. In fact, I know Jews who are in them right now.
The point is, Jews are not a monolithic group, and it is profoundly insulting to generalize from your limited experience to insult an entire culture.
(I could get into why some members of a culture that was the victim of an attempted genocide (or even oppressed cultures in general) might be a little more concerned with the preservation of their race/culture/etc than groups which have not faced imminent extinction within the memory of living people... but I'll leave that to you to ponder, or someone else to explain.)
As for whose suffering in the Holocaust ought to be remembered more, I agree with you that everyone's ought to be known. But that is no call to accuse Jews of wallowing in past miseries and the other very insulting things you said about us. In fact, in my anecdotal experience, the people most likely to be able to tell you who other than the Jews were killed in the Holocaust are... Jews.
In fact, in my anecdotal experience, the people most likely to be able to tell you who other than the Jews were killed in the Holocaust are... Jews.
I'll echo this with my own anecdotal experience as a queer Jewish chick. A while back, I was having one of those long, heartfelt conversation with a non-Jewish queer male friend and it happened to be that we began discussing the Holocaust. He immediately fell into sympathy, saying how awful it was that six million people were killed, etc. I had to correct him: "Eleven million people were killed, it's just that only six million were Jews. You would have been rounded up too."
Nobody Jewish I know says "Never forget the Jews." It's simply "Never forget."
"Do you understand [...] why I just think it's harmful to everbody[sic] for one group to lean so heavily on one part of history?"
I just can't accept that you've thought seriously about this topic with a statement like that. Until people are referred to as PEOPLE (not Jew, not Black, not White, not Muslim, not Gay, not Blind, not Asian, not Handicapped...) but people are seen and, more importantly, treated as just a person, and not some identifiable characteristic to make it easier for people to pigeon hole them, THEY HAVE TO RELY ON a certain part of history.
Because people forget.
Because racist/prejudiced assholes still teach their children discrimination and hate.
Because people still refer to a race/religion in a broad generalization with a crazy amount of racist/prejudiced thinking, and still think they're being "open-minded" and "fair."
Sometimes you should just read posts and scroll past. Or run your comments past someone before posting.
I totally agree. In Canada, there are lots of people who think that First Nations people should stop "whining" about the genocide they suffered two centuries ago. Yet that historical event informs the way that First Nations people are dealt with now, today by our government. They are still suffering the effects of the theft of their land, being herded onto reserves, poverty and racism. Many of them live under third-world conditions without access to running water! And people have the nerve to think that First Nations people are "privileged" because they don't pay Canadian taxes. It's enough to make my head spin.
Um, whoa.
Maybe I'm misreading or you're not aware of how you're coming across here, but declaring that an ethnic group's entire culture is "largely based on victimization and privilege as a result of that victimization" ... I'm having a hard time finding suitable words here.
Not to mention calling on some very old anti-Semitic stereotypes: those whiny "manipulative" Jews who secretly have way too much power.
If you're talking about the specific rhetorical use of the Holocaust to defend everything the government of Israel does -- no, I'm not cool with that either. Amazingly enough, individual people of Jewish heritage have a wide range of individual opinions.
(I'm not cool with the rhetorical use of 9/11 to defend everything George Bush's government does, for that matter, but I doubt people would be happy if I claimed that "American culture" -- or "Christian culture" or "white culture" -- was largely based on this and proceeded to dismiss and denigrate all Americans -- or Christians, or white people -- as a result).
Making this sort of insulting stereotypical generalization about an entire ethnic group and its culture -- that is "frankly racist".
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I also want to say from the outset that no one owns history: it is our common property as human beings, and as such we bear responsibilities to it, chief among which is not to tell lies about it.
In this discussion that you're having above, I see two possibilities.
One thing is that there is a discussion within the Jewish community about how we memorialize the Shoah and its victims, and how central that memory is or should be to Jewish experience. On the one hand, there is the sense that as a religion and a culture, Judaism is focused on life and on the living, and that the insertion of some kind of "cult of martyrs" is alien and, frankly, Christianizing. On the other is the inescapable and unimaginable scale of the loss to our community, and the need to recognize and mourn that loss.
The other -- and what may be going on here -- is the "if only the Jews would stop whining about the Holocaust!" trope. In some circles this is a perfectly acceptable thing to say; it may at times be linked to some residual sense of ancestral guilt (rather like the way some white Americans will say, "if only those black people would stop whining about slavery!") It is also not uncommonly a backhanded way of criticizing the state of Israel. I am not entirely sure of the logic here, but it appears to be something like, "those Jews use the Holocaust to justify whatever Israel does -- we want to criticize Israel and so we also have to criticize the way Jews talk about the Holocaust." I am not entirely sure that the one follows on the other, myself. I think this is one specific point where criticism of Israeli politics slides into anti-semitism.
One sometimes gets the sense that people are jealous of what happened, and I do not understand this at all.
I am engaging with you here, rather than the OP, because I want to have this background here in the comments to this post. And I wanted to thank you for being willing to speak out here.
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Yes. And on one hand, I wince at the idea (which I have seen crop up sometimes) that any criticism of the actions of the Israeli government is de facto anti-Semitic. Especially when some of those criticisms are coming from Israelis and other Jews.
But is some criticism of Israel deeply, deeply anti-Semitic? Hell yeah (and I'm sorry if I didn't make it clear that I think that).
And I wanted to thank you for being willing to speak out here.
No thanks required; I'm partly Jewish, so this hits me on a fairly personal level.
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And now I feel completely embarrassed, and hope you didn't feel I was lecturing you at any point in my comment.
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But no, I don't get any credit for being an ally on this one *g*.
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This is what happens when I try to reply to things before I've had enough caffeine.
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Some people *are* jealous, and I will take a stab at explaining it. It's kind of like the appeal of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (bear with me, here): the circumstances of Buffy's life perfectly justify the kinds of oversized emotions that *all* teenagers feel. No one can call Buffy emo -- she slept with her boyfriend once, and he lost his soul and tried to kill her!
Similarly, I think a lot of people who feel lost and rootless, ignored and marginalized, would like to have something like the Holocaust or slavery in their family history -- something that *everyone* knows about, something that is generally acknowledged to be a source of real sadness, loss, and persecution. Suffering like that is a mark of distinction.
No one wants to live through it themselves. No one looks through their family tree and says "Sorry, Aunt Ida and Uncle Bob, you're the ones I'm going to sacrifice to the Nazis in my fantasy of suffering." No -- they just imagine nebulous lost relatives, people who never were. Just enough to justify the sadness they *already* feel, not enough to cause real, aching grief.
That's my theory, anyway.
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Heh -- I thought about putting that in my comment, too. (The best of pop culture can be relevant in the most unexpected discussions....)
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There are a lot of things that make me uneasy about Jewish culture (outside of the religion), the biggest being the fact that it's largely based on victimization and privilege as a result of that victimization, which is manipulative and, quite frankly, racist -- there's this idea that your membership in a particular race/religion alone entitles you to something -- and also kind of irrelevant at this point.
Wow. In one fell swoop, you claim that
1) the linchpin of Jewish culture is victimization and privelege
2) Which is used for gain and sympathy
3) so Jewish culture is based on racism, greed, and entitlement.
I believe that one of the major definitions of prejudice is attributing negative characteristics to an entire group, and on that basis, that is the most blatantly prejudiced single statement I've read all week. And believe me, it had competetition.
Also, it's pretty low to say, "Come on! Get over that genocide already!"
Reply
I'm actually not talking about Israel, I'm talking more from personal experience -- the things that I have been told by Jewish friends and family members about what is allowed and not allowed, what is okay to do and not okay to do. For instance, I was really shocked when I was talking to several of my awesome, otherwise open-minded friends and they said they were vehemently opposed to interracial and interfaith marriages, and would discriminate against interracial/interfaith couples. I asked why, and they told me, I kid you not, that because of past persecution "Jews have to make more Jews." I was like, "Srsly?" and thought maybe it was just them -- so I polled Jewish friends and family members and found that, yeah, pretty much everybody felt the same way. That was really, really shocking to me, and experiences like that -- it just seems to me that, yes, the Holocaust does get used as a tool to justify things that otherwise wouldn't be acceptable. I'm not talking on a grand sociopolitical scale, I'm talking on a purely cultural, what-we-are-taught-to-believe kind of scale. It gets used the same way Catholics (er, some Catholics) use their religion to pass down some unbelievably offensive beliefs. Does it make more sense to you now? Do you understand, between this and my other posts, why I just think it's harmful to everbody for one group to lean so heavily on one part of history? I'm not trying to be like, "Jews suck for doing this!" because I think it's true of a lot of other groups and a lot of other historical events, and I think it's harmful every single time -- it just happens to be that this was the group and the event that got brought up.
(I agree about 9/11 -- in fact, I was going to use 9/11 as an analagous situation, because I think we as a nation are doing the same thing in an even more dangerous way -- but I probably wouldn't bat an eye at your wording it that way, to be honest, because I tend to take it for granted that when people say "Christian culture" or "white culture" or whatever, they don't literally mean every Christian person or every white person. Maybe I shouldn't -- maybe I should have started some arguments about it in the past -- but I tend to let that slide.)
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The point is, Jews are not a monolithic group, and it is profoundly insulting to generalize from your limited experience to insult an entire culture.
(I could get into why some members of a culture that was the victim of an attempted genocide (or even oppressed cultures in general) might be a little more concerned with the preservation of their race/culture/etc than groups which have not faced imminent extinction within the memory of living people... but I'll leave that to you to ponder, or someone else to explain.)
As for whose suffering in the Holocaust ought to be remembered more, I agree with you that everyone's ought to be known. But that is no call to accuse Jews of wallowing in past miseries and the other very insulting things you said about us. In fact, in my anecdotal experience, the people most likely to be able to tell you who other than the Jews were killed in the Holocaust are... Jews.
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Just, wow.
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I'll echo this with my own anecdotal experience as a queer Jewish chick. A while back, I was having one of those long, heartfelt conversation with a non-Jewish queer male friend and it happened to be that we began discussing the Holocaust. He immediately fell into sympathy, saying how awful it was that six million people were killed, etc. I had to correct him: "Eleven million people were killed, it's just that only six million were Jews. You would have been rounded up too."
Nobody Jewish I know says "Never forget the Jews." It's simply "Never forget."
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I just can't accept that you've thought seriously about this topic with a statement like that. Until people are referred to as PEOPLE (not Jew, not Black, not White, not Muslim, not Gay, not Blind, not Asian, not Handicapped...) but people are seen and, more importantly, treated as just a person, and not some identifiable characteristic to make it easier for people to pigeon hole them, THEY HAVE TO RELY ON a certain part of history.
Because people forget.
Because racist/prejudiced assholes still teach their children discrimination and hate.
Because people still refer to a race/religion in a broad generalization with a crazy amount of racist/prejudiced thinking, and still think they're being "open-minded" and "fair."
Sometimes you should just read posts and scroll past. Or run your comments past someone before posting.
Wow.
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