Jews just can't help themselves, they are a priestly people and seem to be afflicted with a terminal case of messianic utopianism.
Jews have given us the idea of God as Justice and Justice as God, and the prophetic tradition, which is at the root of our history of idealism and of perpetual social and moral renewal (they ask more questions than Socrates!), even if all these centuries later it's just devolved into an infantile instinct to denounce whoever has power at the moment.
But Jews just seem destined to saw off the branch they're sitting on and to create the golem that returns to kill them: first with Marxism and the Soviet Union and now with the reigning faith of Social Justice, which has Jewish fingerprints all over it, from the Frankfurters to Judith Butler to the rebbes of Whiteness Studies (another Jewish creation).
Here in America, for at least 50 years now, Jewish activists have used all their vast verbal and moral powers to denounce Christian society, values, beliefs, thinking that anything that undermined the goys would keep them safe from another pogrom. (Marcuse was given refuge here only to claim we were no different from the Nazis! Same for Adorno who claimed that all traditional families were breeding grounds for fascism.) And now, once again, just like with Moses in the desert, the flock they thought they were leading to the Promised Land has turned on them and decided that they're the real oppressors.
Jews seem to be both a blessed and cursed people, constantly restless and on edge, always looking to trade realism for idealism, essentially their own worst enemy. Or as the great (and highly underrated) writer Isaac Bashevis Singer said: "Jews remain forever Jews with their energy and their rage to mind everybody’s business."
The fondness among Jewish intellectuals for totalising systems does seem to be a persistent thing. For a wide range of such systems, too, not just of the left/progressive version.
I think the Jews had tried to solve their biggest problem, more or less the particularism that always makes them a small yet influential minority and then inevitably a handy scapegoat, by positing some form of universalism where they could find safety by dissolving into some larger universal conception of humanity.
From Saul of Tarsus positing ecumenical universalist Christianity as a way to transcend his particular tribe and its vulnerability to Marx and Freud etc and all the modern systemizers (everyone from Ayn Rand to the Frankfurters to weirdos like Wilhelm Reich), the goal seems to be using massive Jewish brainpower and verbal skill to transcend their predicament as the people everyone loves to hate or at least to carve out some breathing room for them.
Exodus has: "Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites.”
The problem with being a kingdom of priests is that priests always wear out their welcome, especially when the priests worship a different god from yours.
I think that’s just an intellectual thing. And, for many of a certain vintage, the past 75 years have advanced their lives in the shadow of a few key, dominantly narratives - understandable - but the shortfalls of western colonialism has also been on offer.
I think that the patterns you identify are actually much more universal throughout all of humanity than being situated with any particular group. I think what we are experiencing is a great unfolding and perhaps, over the next several months, it may help us as a people - perhaps not unlike some great stock market crash, the bursting of an overly-inflated bubble - the humility of a truly cold shower. That’s my optimistic view.
It seems to me that Israel belongs to Israelis by right of conquest. A combined Arab army tried to conquer them in 1948 and were themselves conquered.
Why is the Jewish occupation of the region any less legitimate than the dozens that came before? All occurred before the United Nations outlawed conquest in 1949 (a law currently ignored by Russia, China, Iran, and various Islamist factions).
Muslims are happy to retain the lands their ancestors subdued and colonized. Being opposed to conquest only when one’s “tribe” is on the losing side is not a principled stand.
None of this is to argue that Jewish activists didn’t create a culture of victimhood to justify Israel’s existence. Perhaps they believed that simply stating the fact that the Jews won and the Arabs lost was too brutal for a world preparing to outlaw conquest. I suspect that the world would have been far better off, though, if Israel had been forthrightly justified by right of conquest rather than by right of victimhood.
As for Progressives’ performative horror of colonization, their brand of “decolonization” translates into recolonization. They have no intention of restoring the cultures of vanquished civilizations, rather they intend to “construct” societies that appeal to their own sensibilities.
UN recognition provides Israel with a legal basis for its existence. However, I’m leery of relying too much on an organization that declared Zionism to be a form of racism and that allowed Iran's envoy to chair a U.N. human rights council meeting.
As a Yankee, a good book to read from the 90s (arguably peak Holocaust blather) is "The Holocaust in American Life". The author quotes a fellow Jew as saying "The Holocaust is the only thing keeping American Jews together."
It is worth pointing out that unlike some other feral catastrophisers the Jewish activists have some decent reason to catastophose in that the Jews have been the European victim class for centuries. Them and the gypsies - which was another group that the Holocaust affected but oddly not many people seem to remember that.
I'm not sure that the Jewish activists pioneered the victim points approach but it is certainly true that they popularized and and showed how successful it can be in the modern "Western" world where it is possible to expect those in power to protect and support victims who cannot defend themselves. The fact that Hamass and the other palestinian groups try to play that card against them is distinctly ironic.
But it was a minor issue in the Anglosphere that now, horrifyingly, has more oomph behind it than has been the case for centuries. Jewish activists have helped to make that true.
This article reeks of useful idiocy. For Jews the Holocaust was uniquely horrible. And also, by being selective in its understanding of Hitler and Nazism, acts to provide fodder for those who see Jews as the problem. The essential thrust is that Jews should not be active but should be quiet and supine, careful to avoid the judgement of their betters. Woe betide that Jews are active in protecting their safety. Woe betide that Jews are active in pointing out those who wish them harm. This is just entitlement. I don't agree.
The suggestion that activists stop doing, or being funded to do, counter-productive things is not an argument for silence or passivity. The activist strategies for the past 50 years or so have patently been disastrous failures and never made sense in the Anglosphere except as donation-and-status grift.
I didn’t read LW as saying that Jewish activism is per se wrong, but that certain Jewish activism has been counterproductive.
Trump and MAGA Republicans fight, but they fight the wrong people over the wrong things. That is not to say that fighting is, in and of itself, bad, but it is to say, if you’re going to fight, fight wisely.
I just came across your article from Nov. 7th, having recently subscribed to your substack. It was thought-provoking, raising interesting points that are mistaken in my view. However, and this says something about our times, they are not dishonorable. I want to honor them by taking them seriously and offering responses that call them into question. I offer three points:
1. You mischaracterize the central claim of Zionism in a subtle but essential way. It was not just that Jews were unsafe in Europe. Writing decades before the Holocaust, Zionist thinkers pointed out that the survival strategies that had kept the Jews alive in the Diaspora for 2000 years were no longer able to deliver the admittedly only marginal safety that they once offered. This was because the liberal promise of the French and American Revolutions had a dark side. Empowering “the People” empowers them to elect Nazis in Germany, slaveholders in the US, and so on. What Zionism called for was what today we would call a paradigm shift. The Jews needed to move from the status of a tolerated (or persecuted) minority to exercising political power over themselves in the family of nations. If not, the results would be catastrophic. You mention the proof of this thesis in your article, but I fear you miss its salience. The Jewish population of Europe faced the catastrophe before the creation of Israel. The Jews of that time and place had nowhere they could go. The Jews in the unoccupied Allied countries could do nothing to make the saving of Jews a war aim of the Allied powers, even as the Nazis were clear about their intentions toward us. Even after the war, the Jewish refugees in Europe were the hardest to place and lingered longest in European DP camps. The Jewish population of the Muslim World (mainly MENA) faced catastrophe after the creation of Israel. About European Jewry, the facts are as you recognize. However, you seem to miss the significance of the fact that most of today’s Israeli Jews are descendants of refugees from MENA. Fatalities happened in those communities (see under “Farhud”), but the people had a state to go to following the paradigm shift. Israel took them in. Missing the central analytic claim made by the Zionists, you also miss the stark reality they faced. Nowhere was there a country that would create the conditions for Jewish independence, which equaled survival in the current iteration of what we ironically call “civilization.” Only one geography could do it. Today, when a majority of the world’s Jews, or very close, live in Israel, and a majority arrived out of fear of persecution in their former countries, it seems clear that the geographic analysis was correct, tragically so, but undeniably. That reality requires us to keep two ideas in our heads. One is that the situation of the Jews was deadly serious in the mid-twentieth century, and the founding of Israel was a necessary and moral step to redress that situation. The second is that there is also justice on the side of the Palestinians. This situation demands compromise. If you follow the problem here for the last thirty years or so, you will no doubt see how hard they find it to address that need to compromise (but that is a separate discussion).
2. Your characterization of the Holocaust is flawed. First, recognizing what was unique in the Holocaust requires recognizing foundational flaws in Western (i.e., Christianity-based) and Islam-based civilizations. (More on this in point 3.) Second, recognizing unique horror doesn’t mean discounting others. You seem to assume it does. Third, what made it unique was A. the simple madness of it. There was no actual conflict between Jews and Germans outside the febrile racist imagination of Nazis and their facilitators. B: The sophisticated industrialization of it. C: The utter inability, or worse - lack of desire of powers at war with the Nazi Empire to address it. Other atrocious massacres share one or two of these characteristics, but none have them all.
3. I suggest you read Princeton professor David Nirenberg’s “Anti-Judaism.” (You may want to set aside some time. It is long, detailed, and what they call “magisterial,” which can be a bit of a deficit if you are a busy person). Nirenberg shows how the use of “Judaism” in the form of often fictitious constructs of Jewish belief, practice, or behavior became a standard tool to address flaws in societies as far back as Rome-dominated Egypt. “Judaizing” was tossed about in arguments between Christians about Christian values, Jews as “hypocrites” are a standard tool in religious debates in the Islamic world. Marx thought it helpful to suggest that “the God of the Jews is Mammon.” And, of course, the Nazis made Jews the centerpiece of their obscene racial imaginings. Much of the behavior of the globalizing world community, as it relates to Israel and discussion of its achievements and flaws, partakes of this deeply embedded intellectual tool.
I invite you to reread your comparison of the Holodomor with the Holocaust in light of point 3. You focus significant energy on Jews and their nefarious behavior, but I ask - to what end? The Holodomor stands as a genocide based on the identity of its victims and the motivations of its perpetrators, not on the small number of anti-Jewish, ethnically Jewish communists involved in the evil Soviet secret services that carried it out. Your argument about victimization must stand or fall on its factual merits, not on the ethnicity of some of those (and there were a majority of non-Jews, after all) who promoted ideas and actions you deplore. The same is true of ideas you support. Is Raphael Lemkin’s understanding of the Holodomor as a genocide more credible because of his Jewish ethnicity (footnote 8)? I suggest it is believable because he is simply correct on the facts.
In short, you may have accessed a deeply embedded intellectual tool and used it without awareness of its problematic nature. I welcome further discussion of this question if you are up for it.
Thank you for your seriousness in responding. First, I am sorry, you display one of the worst regular features of Jewish intellectualism in particular — way too much nit picking. “Jews were not safe in Europe and so therefore needed their own state” is precisely the emotional power of Zionism, from Herzl watching the trial of Dreyfus to the reaction to the Holocaust horrors. Yes, there are lots of ins and outs which were debated over time, but the above is still the base emotional power of Zionism.
That Israel/Zionism had dramatic appeal for Middle Eastern Jews is a very important fact that so many critics of Israel ignore.
A weakness, I now realise, of the above post is that it was too long since I had read ‘Black Earth’. Which I have now re-read, hence the delay in responding. This has led me to do another post on the Jewish lobby, why it is based on false claims about the Holocaust and how counter-productive its activism has been, especially in the Anglosphere. As you will see from the post, such discourse-controlling activism is even more insulting and counter-productive in Australia.
I would note that neither the above post, nor the new one, are about Jews in the present, they are about Jewish activists purporting to speak on behalf of Jews and are part of my continuing critique of activism.
As a US member of (((The Tribe))) myself, I must say I can't disagree with you. What you say here is summed up by a frequent comment I've made under various noms de cyber and in all too many places:
If Hitler were non-white, American Jews would be fighting for first place in line for the camps.
Most Jews don’t actually buy into this madness. The Orthodox, for instance, certainly don’t. On the other hand, bitter comments about the head of the ADL being the new kapo have bite.
The good news is that the Orthodox are a growing share of our population because of their fecundity and resistance to all kinds of fashions in feminism, trannyism, abortion, etc.
The bad news is that the total American Jewish population continues to shrink thanks to intermarriage and sterility.
Not even a little bit. I am blaming the Jewish lobby for propagating the notion of the entitled victim identity, including the demand to thereby veto public discourse.
Hamas was always a vehicle for Jew-hatred. They rewrote their Charter in 2017 to pick up on post-colonial rhetoric and the notion of entitled victim. Which then becomes a vehicle to justify and express already existing Jew-hatred.
Bodies such as ADL which specifically organise on Jewish issues. Not anybody who happens to be Jewish and politically active, which covers the political spectrum. The activists are not the community. A point I have made a different way in talking of, for instance, African-American vampire elites.
So, the activists who, for instance, organise to try and block someone practising law in Scotland in 2012 because they don’t like a novel she published in Australia in 1994. Or who organise campaigns to monster journalists which then turn said journalists into being very pro-Palestinian.
The Truth that dare not speak its name--you have uttered. Your long march through the Substack is, I fear, now at its exit ramp. As another speaker once said--the rest is silence.
Fairly well-balanced and quite thorough overview, at least on a quick skim.
As you suggest, in many ways Jews are their own worst enemies, that, to a substantial degree, they are the authors of their own misfortunes. Though they are, of course, not the only ones.
Not sure myself of this, but something of a case in point is "the tale of 6 million" which has had some currency for the last one hundred years and well before "The Holocaust". Which I'm certainly not denying, at least as substantially accurate. But one might reasonably argue that "activists" have maybe been inflating the numbers, even if somewhat understandably:
Six Million Jews 1915-1938 in New York Times 10 Newspapers:
Even if all of that isn't something of an indictment of "mankind" in general.
However, the roots of the problem in the Jewish psyche and history bear some analysis. A passage or two from Philip Wylie's Generation of Vipers which, even if not entirely accurate, are at least suggestive of the problem and its roots:
PW: " The so-called 'case against the Jew' is the case against humanity. The fault of the Jew is the fault of mankind. But it happens that, in every large nation, there exists a minority of Jews who have carefully maintained their separate identity. To ascribe to them the faults of common man—and to them solely—furnishes a convenient alibi for common man, whose doting vanity has now got him in such shape that he can bear neither to continue as he is nor to look at himself for the reasons of his
course. ....
The Jews, beyond all men until the Nazis, carried that particular vanity to its outermost excess—the segregation of themselves from the rest of humanity, into a 'superrace.' Their vainglorious beginnings are traceable in the Old Testament. Under Joshua, and others, they rolled over the Near East, burning cities, leveling them, sowing salt in the ruins, carrying away the woman for concubines, and putting the males to death. ....
Unfortunately, the consciousness of Jewishness cannot be eliminated overnight, either from Gentiles or from Jews. It represents a memory—a memory of a race of people, once conquerors, once authors of the idea of superiority, once the terror of the Near East, and afterward for two thousand years and more so recklessly determined to stick to the notion of superiority that they reviled the rest of man—no matter what penalty they had to pay for doing it. Such is the cost of every 'Herrenvolk' idea. Contemporary Jews—innocent of any blame whatever, but still attacked at every turn by the long, harsh, reasonless, race memories of man— are born and live and die in the fantastic and irrelevant predicament of merely being Jewish." [pgs. 77 to 86]
Sure. Kind of the nature of the beast. A favourite quote along the same line from Booker T. Washington:
BTW: "There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
But that really doesn't absolve "Jewish identity or Jewishness" -- or "Black identity or Blackishness" for that matter -- for the "crimes" committed in their names. Arguably the former underwrote the creation of Israel to begin with, part and parcel of which were a number of "crimes" if not some outright "ethnic cleansing":
The story of popular Trumpism in the U.S. (frequently echoed now around the world), and, the story we are seeing unfold on the left, in blood, are mirror images. Software engineers see these behaviors as being of the same “Class”. Chemists recognize stereo-isomers, and musicians hear variations on a theme. They are - to all others - essentially the same thing.
Populism, in various forms, is certainly part of modern information dynamics, but is more a reaction to various elite dynamics than a mirroring of them. Political polarisation does have some mirroring dynamics though. Martin Gurri is useful on the implications of the evolving information environment. https://press.stripe.com/the-revolt-of-the-public
The post isn’t about Jews, but about the Jewish lobby. There has been something of an unholy alliance between Marxists of various stripes trying to hide or shift attention from yet another Marxist terror-famine and those within the Jewish lobby wishing to preserve the uniqueness of the Holocaust. The fuss over ‘The Hand That Signed The Paper’ was absolutely about the Jewish lobby not wanting an inconvenient debate over, or attention to, the Holodomor.
I really do mean organisations such as the ADL. One of the more striking results of October 7th and aftermath is, quite justified, anger from within the Jewish community of where the ADL has ended up: references to the head of the ADL being a new kapo have bite.
Jews just can't help themselves, they are a priestly people and seem to be afflicted with a terminal case of messianic utopianism.
Jews have given us the idea of God as Justice and Justice as God, and the prophetic tradition, which is at the root of our history of idealism and of perpetual social and moral renewal (they ask more questions than Socrates!), even if all these centuries later it's just devolved into an infantile instinct to denounce whoever has power at the moment.
But Jews just seem destined to saw off the branch they're sitting on and to create the golem that returns to kill them: first with Marxism and the Soviet Union and now with the reigning faith of Social Justice, which has Jewish fingerprints all over it, from the Frankfurters to Judith Butler to the rebbes of Whiteness Studies (another Jewish creation).
Here in America, for at least 50 years now, Jewish activists have used all their vast verbal and moral powers to denounce Christian society, values, beliefs, thinking that anything that undermined the goys would keep them safe from another pogrom. (Marcuse was given refuge here only to claim we were no different from the Nazis! Same for Adorno who claimed that all traditional families were breeding grounds for fascism.) And now, once again, just like with Moses in the desert, the flock they thought they were leading to the Promised Land has turned on them and decided that they're the real oppressors.
Jews seem to be both a blessed and cursed people, constantly restless and on edge, always looking to trade realism for idealism, essentially their own worst enemy. Or as the great (and highly underrated) writer Isaac Bashevis Singer said: "Jews remain forever Jews with their energy and their rage to mind everybody’s business."
The fondness among Jewish intellectuals for totalising systems does seem to be a persistent thing. For a wide range of such systems, too, not just of the left/progressive version.
I think the Jews had tried to solve their biggest problem, more or less the particularism that always makes them a small yet influential minority and then inevitably a handy scapegoat, by positing some form of universalism where they could find safety by dissolving into some larger universal conception of humanity.
From Saul of Tarsus positing ecumenical universalist Christianity as a way to transcend his particular tribe and its vulnerability to Marx and Freud etc and all the modern systemizers (everyone from Ayn Rand to the Frankfurters to weirdos like Wilhelm Reich), the goal seems to be using massive Jewish brainpower and verbal skill to transcend their predicament as the people everyone loves to hate or at least to carve out some breathing room for them.
Exodus has: "Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites.”
The problem with being a kingdom of priests is that priests always wear out their welcome, especially when the priests worship a different god from yours.
I think that’s just an intellectual thing. And, for many of a certain vintage, the past 75 years have advanced their lives in the shadow of a few key, dominantly narratives - understandable - but the shortfalls of western colonialism has also been on offer.
I think that the patterns you identify are actually much more universal throughout all of humanity than being situated with any particular group. I think what we are experiencing is a great unfolding and perhaps, over the next several months, it may help us as a people - perhaps not unlike some great stock market crash, the bursting of an overly-inflated bubble - the humility of a truly cold shower. That’s my optimistic view.
This post is a critique of activism, not of being Jewish. The horrifying resurgence in anti-Semitism was a major reason for doing the post.
To be sure, your post (Lorenzo) is certainly not a critique of being Jewish. Far from it. My response here was to the first commentary.
And yet this post itself is absolutely guaranteed to be condemned as anti-Semitic.
It seems to me that Israel belongs to Israelis by right of conquest. A combined Arab army tried to conquer them in 1948 and were themselves conquered.
Why is the Jewish occupation of the region any less legitimate than the dozens that came before? All occurred before the United Nations outlawed conquest in 1949 (a law currently ignored by Russia, China, Iran, and various Islamist factions).
Muslims are happy to retain the lands their ancestors subdued and colonized. Being opposed to conquest only when one’s “tribe” is on the losing side is not a principled stand.
None of this is to argue that Jewish activists didn’t create a culture of victimhood to justify Israel’s existence. Perhaps they believed that simply stating the fact that the Jews won and the Arabs lost was too brutal for a world preparing to outlaw conquest. I suspect that the world would have been far better off, though, if Israel had been forthrightly justified by right of conquest rather than by right of victimhood.
As for Progressives’ performative horror of colonization, their brand of “decolonization” translates into recolonization. They have no intention of restoring the cultures of vanquished civilizations, rather they intend to “construct” societies that appeal to their own sensibilities.
Well put. Israel could also claim right of UN recognition.
UN recognition provides Israel with a legal basis for its existence. However, I’m leery of relying too much on an organization that declared Zionism to be a form of racism and that allowed Iran's envoy to chair a U.N. human rights council meeting.
As a Yankee, a good book to read from the 90s (arguably peak Holocaust blather) is "The Holocaust in American Life". The author quotes a fellow Jew as saying "The Holocaust is the only thing keeping American Jews together."
The Golems of The Copybook Headings.
Or perhaps Copybook Margins.
It is worth pointing out that unlike some other feral catastrophisers the Jewish activists have some decent reason to catastophose in that the Jews have been the European victim class for centuries. Them and the gypsies - which was another group that the Holocaust affected but oddly not many people seem to remember that.
I'm not sure that the Jewish activists pioneered the victim points approach but it is certainly true that they popularized and and showed how successful it can be in the modern "Western" world where it is possible to expect those in power to protect and support victims who cannot defend themselves. The fact that Hamass and the other palestinian groups try to play that card against them is distinctly ironic.
Anti-Semitism is very real. Which people continue to wrestle with. https://michaelshermer.substack.com/p/why-the-jews
But it was a minor issue in the Anglosphere that now, horrifyingly, has more oomph behind it than has been the case for centuries. Jewish activists have helped to make that true.
I recently read By Way of Deception - the making and unmaking of a Mossad officer written by Victor Ostrovsky in 1990. Excellent read
I am late to the party, but this is an excellent summary of the problem the Jewish community in the anglosphere faces, very well written. Thank you
I trust you know better than I the road forward, and that you will avoid any unexpected off-ramps. Continued well-wishes.
This article reeks of useful idiocy. For Jews the Holocaust was uniquely horrible. And also, by being selective in its understanding of Hitler and Nazism, acts to provide fodder for those who see Jews as the problem. The essential thrust is that Jews should not be active but should be quiet and supine, careful to avoid the judgement of their betters. Woe betide that Jews are active in protecting their safety. Woe betide that Jews are active in pointing out those who wish them harm. This is just entitlement. I don't agree.
The suggestion that activists stop doing, or being funded to do, counter-productive things is not an argument for silence or passivity. The activist strategies for the past 50 years or so have patently been disastrous failures and never made sense in the Anglosphere except as donation-and-status grift.
I didn’t read LW as saying that Jewish activism is per se wrong, but that certain Jewish activism has been counterproductive.
Trump and MAGA Republicans fight, but they fight the wrong people over the wrong things. That is not to say that fighting is, in and of itself, bad, but it is to say, if you’re going to fight, fight wisely.
It does reek.
Shalom Mr. Warby,
I just came across your article from Nov. 7th, having recently subscribed to your substack. It was thought-provoking, raising interesting points that are mistaken in my view. However, and this says something about our times, they are not dishonorable. I want to honor them by taking them seriously and offering responses that call them into question. I offer three points:
1. You mischaracterize the central claim of Zionism in a subtle but essential way. It was not just that Jews were unsafe in Europe. Writing decades before the Holocaust, Zionist thinkers pointed out that the survival strategies that had kept the Jews alive in the Diaspora for 2000 years were no longer able to deliver the admittedly only marginal safety that they once offered. This was because the liberal promise of the French and American Revolutions had a dark side. Empowering “the People” empowers them to elect Nazis in Germany, slaveholders in the US, and so on. What Zionism called for was what today we would call a paradigm shift. The Jews needed to move from the status of a tolerated (or persecuted) minority to exercising political power over themselves in the family of nations. If not, the results would be catastrophic. You mention the proof of this thesis in your article, but I fear you miss its salience. The Jewish population of Europe faced the catastrophe before the creation of Israel. The Jews of that time and place had nowhere they could go. The Jews in the unoccupied Allied countries could do nothing to make the saving of Jews a war aim of the Allied powers, even as the Nazis were clear about their intentions toward us. Even after the war, the Jewish refugees in Europe were the hardest to place and lingered longest in European DP camps. The Jewish population of the Muslim World (mainly MENA) faced catastrophe after the creation of Israel. About European Jewry, the facts are as you recognize. However, you seem to miss the significance of the fact that most of today’s Israeli Jews are descendants of refugees from MENA. Fatalities happened in those communities (see under “Farhud”), but the people had a state to go to following the paradigm shift. Israel took them in. Missing the central analytic claim made by the Zionists, you also miss the stark reality they faced. Nowhere was there a country that would create the conditions for Jewish independence, which equaled survival in the current iteration of what we ironically call “civilization.” Only one geography could do it. Today, when a majority of the world’s Jews, or very close, live in Israel, and a majority arrived out of fear of persecution in their former countries, it seems clear that the geographic analysis was correct, tragically so, but undeniably. That reality requires us to keep two ideas in our heads. One is that the situation of the Jews was deadly serious in the mid-twentieth century, and the founding of Israel was a necessary and moral step to redress that situation. The second is that there is also justice on the side of the Palestinians. This situation demands compromise. If you follow the problem here for the last thirty years or so, you will no doubt see how hard they find it to address that need to compromise (but that is a separate discussion).
2. Your characterization of the Holocaust is flawed. First, recognizing what was unique in the Holocaust requires recognizing foundational flaws in Western (i.e., Christianity-based) and Islam-based civilizations. (More on this in point 3.) Second, recognizing unique horror doesn’t mean discounting others. You seem to assume it does. Third, what made it unique was A. the simple madness of it. There was no actual conflict between Jews and Germans outside the febrile racist imagination of Nazis and their facilitators. B: The sophisticated industrialization of it. C: The utter inability, or worse - lack of desire of powers at war with the Nazi Empire to address it. Other atrocious massacres share one or two of these characteristics, but none have them all.
3. I suggest you read Princeton professor David Nirenberg’s “Anti-Judaism.” (You may want to set aside some time. It is long, detailed, and what they call “magisterial,” which can be a bit of a deficit if you are a busy person). Nirenberg shows how the use of “Judaism” in the form of often fictitious constructs of Jewish belief, practice, or behavior became a standard tool to address flaws in societies as far back as Rome-dominated Egypt. “Judaizing” was tossed about in arguments between Christians about Christian values, Jews as “hypocrites” are a standard tool in religious debates in the Islamic world. Marx thought it helpful to suggest that “the God of the Jews is Mammon.” And, of course, the Nazis made Jews the centerpiece of their obscene racial imaginings. Much of the behavior of the globalizing world community, as it relates to Israel and discussion of its achievements and flaws, partakes of this deeply embedded intellectual tool.
I invite you to reread your comparison of the Holodomor with the Holocaust in light of point 3. You focus significant energy on Jews and their nefarious behavior, but I ask - to what end? The Holodomor stands as a genocide based on the identity of its victims and the motivations of its perpetrators, not on the small number of anti-Jewish, ethnically Jewish communists involved in the evil Soviet secret services that carried it out. Your argument about victimization must stand or fall on its factual merits, not on the ethnicity of some of those (and there were a majority of non-Jews, after all) who promoted ideas and actions you deplore. The same is true of ideas you support. Is Raphael Lemkin’s understanding of the Holodomor as a genocide more credible because of his Jewish ethnicity (footnote 8)? I suggest it is believable because he is simply correct on the facts.
In short, you may have accessed a deeply embedded intellectual tool and used it without awareness of its problematic nature. I welcome further discussion of this question if you are up for it.
Thank you for your seriousness in responding. First, I am sorry, you display one of the worst regular features of Jewish intellectualism in particular — way too much nit picking. “Jews were not safe in Europe and so therefore needed their own state” is precisely the emotional power of Zionism, from Herzl watching the trial of Dreyfus to the reaction to the Holocaust horrors. Yes, there are lots of ins and outs which were debated over time, but the above is still the base emotional power of Zionism.
Yes, I am well aware of the Middle Eastern history. See this post, https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/marxism-is-a-dreadful-framing
Also
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/in-the-shadow-of-empire
Also
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/hamas-displays-a-muslim-way-of-war
That Israel/Zionism had dramatic appeal for Middle Eastern Jews is a very important fact that so many critics of Israel ignore.
A weakness, I now realise, of the above post is that it was too long since I had read ‘Black Earth’. Which I have now re-read, hence the delay in responding. This has led me to do another post on the Jewish lobby, why it is based on false claims about the Holocaust and how counter-productive its activism has been, especially in the Anglosphere. As you will see from the post, such discourse-controlling activism is even more insulting and counter-productive in Australia.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/professor-snyder-demolishes-jewish
I would note that neither the above post, nor the new one, are about Jews in the present, they are about Jewish activists purporting to speak on behalf of Jews and are part of my continuing critique of activism.
As a US member of (((The Tribe))) myself, I must say I can't disagree with you. What you say here is summed up by a frequent comment I've made under various noms de cyber and in all too many places:
If Hitler were non-white, American Jews would be fighting for first place in line for the camps.
Most Jews don’t actually buy into this madness. The Orthodox, for instance, certainly don’t. On the other hand, bitter comments about the head of the ADL being the new kapo have bite.
The good news is that the Orthodox are a growing share of our population because of their fecundity and resistance to all kinds of fashions in feminism, trannyism, abortion, etc.
The bad news is that the total American Jewish population continues to shrink thanks to intermarriage and sterility.
It seems pretty much that you are blaming Jews for antisemitism. Do you blame Blacks for racism? Do you blame women for sexual violence against them?
Not even a little bit. I am blaming the Jewish lobby for propagating the notion of the entitled victim identity, including the demand to thereby veto public discourse.
Hamas was always a vehicle for Jew-hatred. They rewrote their Charter in 2017 to pick up on post-colonial rhetoric and the notion of entitled victim. Which then becomes a vehicle to justify and express already existing Jew-hatred.
Please clarify. What Jewish lobby?
Bodies such as ADL which specifically organise on Jewish issues. Not anybody who happens to be Jewish and politically active, which covers the political spectrum. The activists are not the community. A point I have made a different way in talking of, for instance, African-American vampire elites.
https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/race-and-other-annoyances
So, the activists who, for instance, organise to try and block someone practising law in Scotland in 2012 because they don’t like a novel she published in Australia in 1994. Or who organise campaigns to monster journalists which then turn said journalists into being very pro-Palestinian.
The Truth that dare not speak its name--you have uttered. Your long march through the Substack is, I fear, now at its exit ramp. As another speaker once said--the rest is silence.
It is part of my critique of activism. As I have no intention of lingering on this, we will see.
Fairly well-balanced and quite thorough overview, at least on a quick skim.
As you suggest, in many ways Jews are their own worst enemies, that, to a substantial degree, they are the authors of their own misfortunes. Though they are, of course, not the only ones.
Not sure myself of this, but something of a case in point is "the tale of 6 million" which has had some currency for the last one hundred years and well before "The Holocaust". Which I'm certainly not denying, at least as substantially accurate. But one might reasonably argue that "activists" have maybe been inflating the numbers, even if somewhat understandably:
Six Million Jews 1915-1938 in New York Times 10 Newspapers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=KHrpuSBx6D8
NYTimes:
https://www.nytimes.com/1918/10/18/archives/1000000000-fund-to-rebuild-jewry-six-million-souls-will-need-help.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8kw.-R2O.JSZDey5YdRBR&smid=url-share
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1918/10/18/97034297.pdf
Library of Congress:
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030272/1915-06-06/ed-1/seq-49/
Even if all of that isn't something of an indictment of "mankind" in general.
However, the roots of the problem in the Jewish psyche and history bear some analysis. A passage or two from Philip Wylie's Generation of Vipers which, even if not entirely accurate, are at least suggestive of the problem and its roots:
PW: " The so-called 'case against the Jew' is the case against humanity. The fault of the Jew is the fault of mankind. But it happens that, in every large nation, there exists a minority of Jews who have carefully maintained their separate identity. To ascribe to them the faults of common man—and to them solely—furnishes a convenient alibi for common man, whose doting vanity has now got him in such shape that he can bear neither to continue as he is nor to look at himself for the reasons of his
course. ....
The Jews, beyond all men until the Nazis, carried that particular vanity to its outermost excess—the segregation of themselves from the rest of humanity, into a 'superrace.' Their vainglorious beginnings are traceable in the Old Testament. Under Joshua, and others, they rolled over the Near East, burning cities, leveling them, sowing salt in the ruins, carrying away the woman for concubines, and putting the males to death. ....
Unfortunately, the consciousness of Jewishness cannot be eliminated overnight, either from Gentiles or from Jews. It represents a memory—a memory of a race of people, once conquerors, once authors of the idea of superiority, once the terror of the Near East, and afterward for two thousand years and more so recklessly determined to stick to the notion of superiority that they reviled the rest of man—no matter what penalty they had to pay for doing it. Such is the cost of every 'Herrenvolk' idea. Contemporary Jews—innocent of any blame whatever, but still attacked at every turn by the long, harsh, reasonless, race memories of man— are born and live and die in the fantastic and irrelevant predicament of merely being Jewish." [pgs. 77 to 86]
https://vultureofcritique.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/philip-wylie-generation-of-vipers.pdf
I have no problem with Jewish identity or Jewishness. This post is part of my critique of activism.
Some reason to argue that "Jewish identity or Jewishness" is part and parcel of Jewish "activism".
Who exactly do you think funds all of that activism?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_responsibility
But that is my point, activists encourage paranoia so as to generate donations.
Sure. Kind of the nature of the beast. A favourite quote along the same line from Booker T. Washington:
BTW: "There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booker_T._Washington
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/542300-there-is-another-class-of-coloured-people-who-make-a
But that really doesn't absolve "Jewish identity or Jewishness" -- or "Black identity or Blackishness" for that matter -- for the "crimes" committed in their names. Arguably the former underwrote the creation of Israel to begin with, part and parcel of which were a number of "crimes" if not some outright "ethnic cleansing":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre
The story of popular Trumpism in the U.S. (frequently echoed now around the world), and, the story we are seeing unfold on the left, in blood, are mirror images. Software engineers see these behaviors as being of the same “Class”. Chemists recognize stereo-isomers, and musicians hear variations on a theme. They are - to all others - essentially the same thing.
Populism, in various forms, is certainly part of modern information dynamics, but is more a reaction to various elite dynamics than a mirroring of them. Political polarisation does have some mirroring dynamics though. Martin Gurri is useful on the implications of the evolving information environment. https://press.stripe.com/the-revolt-of-the-public
yes, great book.
The post isn’t about Jews, but about the Jewish lobby. There has been something of an unholy alliance between Marxists of various stripes trying to hide or shift attention from yet another Marxist terror-famine and those within the Jewish lobby wishing to preserve the uniqueness of the Holocaust. The fuss over ‘The Hand That Signed The Paper’ was absolutely about the Jewish lobby not wanting an inconvenient debate over, or attention to, the Holodomor.
You are completely missing that this post is part of a much larger critique of activism. See, for instance, https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/race-and-other-annoyances .
I really do mean organisations such as the ADL. One of the more striking results of October 7th and aftermath is, quite justified, anger from within the Jewish community of where the ADL has ended up: references to the head of the ADL being a new kapo have bite.