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argyrocratie · 5 months

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"In “Memory Voids and Role Reversals,” Palestinian political science professor Dana El Kurd writes of her jarring experience, hearing of the October 7th massacres by Hamas while visiting the Holocaust Tower at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. She notes the historic irony of Holocaust survivors seeking security from future oppression by expelling another people from their homeland by the hundreds of thousands, ghettoizing them in enclaves enforced by military checkpoints, and controlling them with collective punishment.

The irony of a state formed as the “antithesis” to the ghetto using ghettoization as a strategy of control is not lost on Palestinians. This infrastructure of coercion went hand in hand, of course, with ever-present physical violence — imprisonment, home demolitions, air strikes and more.

She quotes Aristide Zolberg’s observation that “formation of a new state can be a ‘refugee-generating process.’”

This is not only true of Palestinians. The Westphalian nation-state, which has been the normative component of the international system since the Treaty of Westphalia, necessarily entails (especially since the post-1789 identification of nationalism with the nation-state) the suppression of ethnic identity to a far greater extent than the expression of any such identity. Every constructed national identity associated with a “State of the X People” has necessarily involved the suppression and homogenization of countless ethnicities present in the territory claimed by that state. At the time of the French Revolution, barely half the “French” population spoke any of the many langue d’oil dialects of northern France, let alone the dialect of the Ile de France (the basis for the official “French” language). The rest spoke Occitan dialects like Provençal, or non-Romance languages like Breton (whose closest living relative is Welsh). The same is true of Catalan, Aragonese, Basque, and Galician in Spain, the low-German languages and now-extinct Wendish in Germany, the non-Javanese ethnicities of Indonesia, and so on. Heads of state issue sonorous pronouncements concerning the “Nigerian People” or “Zimbabwean People,” in reference to multi-ethnic populations whose entire “identity” centers on lines drawn on a map at the Berlin Conference.

When I say official national languages were established through the suppression of their rivals, I mean things like the residential schools of the United States and Canada punishing Native children for using their own languages. Or schools around the world shaming students with signs reading “I Spoke Welsh (or Breton, or Provencal, or Catalan, or Basque, or Ainu, or an African vernacular instead of the English, French, etc., lingua franca). And so on.

And when we consider the range of artificial national identities that were constructed by suppressing other real ethnicities, we can’t forget the “Jewish People” of Israel. Its construction occurred part and parcel with the suppression of diasporic Jewish ethnic identities all over Europe and the Middle East. The “New Jewish” identity constructed by modern Zionism was associated with the artificial revival of Hebrew, which had been almost entirely a liturgical language for 2300 years, as an official national language. And this, in turn, was associated with the suppression — both official and unofficial — of the actually existing Jewish ethnicities associated with the Yiddish, Ladino, and Arabic languages.

The centuries-old languages and cultures of actual Jewish ethnicities throughout Europe were treated as shameful relics of the past, to be submerged and amalgamated into a new artificially constructed Jewish identity centered on the Hebrew language.

Yiddish, the language spoken by the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe — derived from an archaic German dialect and written in the Hebrew alphabet — was stigmatized by Zionist leaders in Palestine and by the early Israeli government. According to Max Weinreich’s History of the Yiddish Language, the “very making of Hebrew into a spoken language derives from the will to separate from the Diaspora.” Diasporic Jewish identities, as viewed by Zionist settlers, were “a cultural morass to be purged.” The “New Jew” was an idealized superhuman construct, almost completely divorced from centuries worth of culture and traditions of actual Jews: “Yiddish began to represent diaspora and feebleness, said linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann. ‘And Zionists wanted to be Dionysian: wild, strong, muscular and independent.’”

This “contempt for the Diaspora” was “manifested . . . in the fierce campaign against Yiddish in Palestine, which led not only to the banning of Yiddish newspapers and theaters but even to physical attacks against Yiddish speakers.” From the 1920s on, anyone in Palestine with the temerity to publish in Yiddish risked having their printing press destroyed by organizations with names like the “Battalion of the Defenders of the Hebrew Language,” “Organization for the Enforcement of Hebrew,” and “Central Council for the Enforcement of Hebrew.” The showing of the Yiddish-language film Mayn Yidishe Mame (“My Yiddish Mama”), in Tel Aviv in 1930, provoked a riot led by the above-mentioned Battalion. After the foundation of Israel, “every immigrant was required to study Hebrew and often to adopt a Hebrew surname.” In its early days Israel legally prohibited plays and periodicals in the Yiddish language. A recent defender of the early suppression of Yiddish, in the Jerusalem Post, argued that Diasporic languages threatened to “undermine the Zionist project”; in other words, an admission that actually existing ethnic identities threatened an identity manufactured by a nationalist ideology.

If this is true of Yiddish — the native language of the Ashkenazi Jews who dominated the Zionist settlement of Palestine — it’s even more so of the suppression of Jewish ethnic identities outside the dominant Sephardic minority. Golda Meir once dismissed Jews of non-Ashkenazi or non-Yiddish descent as “not Jews.”

Consider the roughly half of the Israeli population comprised of Mizrahi Jews from Middle Eastern communities (including those living in Palestine itself before European settlement). Although the Mizrahim are trotted out as worthy victims when they are convenient for purposes of Israeli propaganda — the majority of them were expelled from Arab countries like Iraq after 1948, in what was an undeniable atrocity — they are treated the rest of the time as an embarrassment or a joke, and have been heavily discriminated against, by the descendants of Ashkenazi settlers. For example former Prime Minister David Ben Gurion described Mizrahim

as lacking even “the most elementary knowledge” and “without a trace of Jewish or human education.” Ben Gurion repeatedly expressed contempt for the culture of the Oriental Jews: “We do not want Israelis to become Arabs. We are in duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies, and preserve the authentic Jewish values as they crystallized in the Diaspora.”

Current Prime Minister Netanyahu once joked about a “Mizrahi gene” as his excuse for tardiness. And an Israeli realtor ran a commercial appealing to “there goes the neighborhood” sentiments by depicting a light-skinned family having their Passover celebration disrupted by uncouth Mizrahi neighbors.

Nationalism and the nation-state are the enemies of true ethnicity and culture, and built on their graves. There’s no better illustration of this principle than the Zionist project itself."

-Kevin Carson, "Zionism and the Nation-State: Palestinians Are Not the Only Victims"

#kevin carson #zionism #nation state #yiddish

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batmanego · 3 months

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to articulate my thoughts better: part of the reason (a comparatively small part, as most of it has to do with, you know, The Genocide) zionism is so infuriating to me as a jew is that the jewish struggle is only ever acknowledged when it is convenient and can be weaponized. shoah survivors are only ever acknowledged in the claims of “where else were they supposed to go?” and nobody ever stops to question the idea that we allowed so many people, traumatized irreparably, to be then forced out of their homes and sent off to a land that in all likelihood they had no connection to. arab jews are only ever acknowledged in the claims of “see, we’re from here!” and the complexity of their situation as well as israel’s forceful creation of the mizrahi identity to strip arab jews of their arab identities are never thought of. israel is the only safe place for jews to be, and not a thought is given to the idea that maybe that’s a bad thing, and heaven forbid we acknowledge that that’s not actually true for any jew that isn’t white. israel supports marriage equality, except that it really actually doesn’t at all, it only acknowledges same sex unions made outside the country, and performing them in the country still isn’t possible, and patrilineal jews might not be able to get married. israel is a state all jews can return to, except nigerian jews. israel is preserving jewish culture, except for the fact that it’s mashed all diaspora cultures down into one that’s half-cultural appropriation, half-pan-ashkenazi. it’s a state that prides itself on religious tradition, except anti-zionist orthodox jews are being beaten in the streets and the whole idea of “leave the dead undisturbed” is being flagrantly violated with state-sanctioned teams performing posthumous semen extraction. it’s for all these reasons that i grit my teeth when israel claims to be a jewish state. whatever judaism they are practicing, whatever culture they have, i can barely recognize. when i think of dancing in jerusalem, i cannot picture it in the jerusalem they have built. certainly not on the corpses of palestinians.

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secular-jew · 4 months

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DAILY ISLAMIC CALIPHATE NEWS:

Over the Xmas period, Fulani Islamist militias murdered 181 Christian Nigerians in 4 villages and in Plateau State.

The Fulani people joined a militia formed in 2009 to fight the Tuaregs. Many Fulani were then integrated into the MOJWA, then into the ISGS, the Islamic State in the Great Sahara.

No Jews, no news.

Source: Steven Kefas

#Nigeria #Islamic caliphate #caliphate #secular-jew #israel #jewish #judaism #israeli #jerusalem #diaspora #secular jew #secularjew #islam #Islamists #jihad #jihadis #Islamic murder #kafirs #fulani

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gsirvitor · 1 year

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@blogpostsofvariablequality

How much does it affect them today? The same amount it affects non Europeans at the hands of Europeans, you can fill in the blank.

See, this is why I dislike the umbrella term of white people, sure it's an apt descriptor of a racial group, but it hides the nuance, the complexity of European history, culture and baggage.

The entirety of Eastern Europe has a multi thousand year history of being invaded by Asians and Middle Easterners, from the Turks, to the Huns, to the Ottomans, then there's the Greeks who have beef with the Turks and a history of Persian invasion, the entirety of Mediterranean Europe with the Barbary slave trade, the Mongol invasions, the black death, the Muslim conquests, etc etc, I can go on for hours, and that's not even bringing up the origins of the term Slave, which referred to a certain squating peoples now at war with eachother.

Every group is advantaged and disadvantaged by the modern world, especially in the west, for instance, a black man from Nigeria who moves to America is more often a higher earner than his American counterpart, why? Well it isn't disadvantages built into the system, it's the culture, for the Nigerian man his is a boon while the American's is a drag, why? One is built upon hard work, morals and looking to the future, while the other is dead set on looking at the past and wallowing in it, blaming all failures, not on one's self but on a nebulous bogeyman, the same way the Nazis blamed the Jews.

The same goes for any race, Europeans are outcompeted in their own nations by Asians and Indians, not because they're actually at any disadvantage other than what is self imposed, and that's the crux, those who screech about being perpetually disadvantaged by the "white" man, never work to improve themselves, to create a better future for their descendants, no, they just whine and beg for free handouts, as the Greeks say; "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."

Your statements mean very little, yes, the world is colonized, it has been colonized since time immemorial, over and over and over again, yes, Europeans did that to themselves, and others did it to them, just as Africans, Asians, Middle Easterners, etc have all done it to themselves and others since time immemorial, same goes for subjugation, slavery, etc.

And no, European colonization, when compared to the conquests of the past, were some of the least violent conquests in history, sure the land area claimed is incomparable, but the savagery, the brutality etc, pales in comparison to even just the Mongols and Huns.

Yes, the plague brought many benefits, such as modern labor movements, improvements in medicine and a new approach to life, much of the Italian Renaissance, even Shakespeare's drama to some extent, is an aftershock of the Black Death. Today its effects can be seen in the resistance to AIDS seen in some European populations.

However, the black death was only a benefit to the descendants of those who survived one of the darkest pages in European history, its consequences were profound. Besides the immeasurable pain and grief, traditional Medieval society was thrown into chaos and turmoil, economies were fractured, the Church lost status, and art and literature took a turn for the gruesome and bizarre, and Europe lost 30-60% of its population.

Ah yes, racism and antisemitism, something about this post has made people act quite racist, from calling for the subjugation of the white race, to comparing me, someone of Jewish descent, to the Nazis, this post has been a magnet for the mentally compromised.

However, I don't expect any critical thinking skills from, as you put it, racist idiots, so I say again, I don't care about the suffering of your ancestors, for you don't care about mine.

Good Day.

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lila-rae · 6 months

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This is exactly as if the US and its European allies decided that the reparations for slavery would be establishing a country for Black Americans in what today is Nigeria, forcing all Nigerians to leave or be killed in order to establish it. The ancestors of Black Americans were forcibly removed from their lands in West Africa just 200-300 years ago. The Romans forcibly removed Jews from Palestine 2000 years ago.

Reparations for European Jews should come from Germany and its allies during WW2, including ceding GERMAN territory to establish the new state of Israel. Palestinians had nothing to do with the removal of Jews from Roman Palestine 2000 years ago or with the much more recent Holocaust. You don't atone for ethnic cleansing by ethnically cleansing another unrelated group

This.

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mariacallous · 7 months

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(JTA) — Bruce Friedman was moved by “The Diary of Anne Frank” when he read it at age 9. As a child in a kosher-keeping Jewish home on Long Island, he saw in the Holocaust memoir an essential lesson for Jewish and non-Jewish children alike.

“You learn to sympathize, empathize, share the fear and the horror and the fright and disgust with man’s inhumanity to man,” he recalled about the book. “And it’s not just the Nazis. It’s the human condition. We’re really good at hurting each other.”

And yet decades later, Friedman filed a challenge with his local school district in Florida to remove a new version of the diary from classroom shelves. The book, he wrote on a district form, “does disservice to lessons on the Holocaust.”

He added, in all-caps, “PROTECT CHILDREN!”

Last month, the local school board sided with Friedman and voted to remove “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” from all grade levels in the district, with a spokesperson saying it was removed “based on state statute.” Also removed based on Friedman’s challenge: William Styron’s Holocaust novel “Sophie’s Choice.”

The successes followed two of hundreds of challenges Friedman has filed against books in Clay County, near Jacksonville, where he moved from New York during the pandemic. He has files on thousands more books that others have challenged. From his home there, the Jewish father has become one of the country’s most prolific and zealous participants in the movement to purge public schools of certain books.

The movement has largely targeted books featuring LGBTQ themes and content about racial equity, while catching books on other topics — including Jewish stories — in its dragnet. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has embedded the values of the movement into state law, making it easier for a small number of parents — or even just one — to force their districts to make books inaccessible to students.

The movement is most closely associated with a group called Moms of Liberty and inherits its worldview and tactics from decades of Christian family-values advocacy. But it turns out its flag-bearers can be Jewish dads, too.

Friedman recognizes that he stands out. “I figured we’d have a lot to talk about, Jew boy,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

He stands out in another way, too. Unlike many of his fellow book challengers, Friedman, a self-identified “bibliophile,” insists he reads every book he seeks to remove. He documents his objections as he goes in reams of challenge forms that he stores in his home office.

In objecting to a children’s biography of Harriet Tubman, for example, he says, “Telling them that the Civil War was all about slavery is a lie.” The picture book “Arthur’s Birthday,” featuring the cartoon aardvark, was bad in his view because “it is not appropriate to discuss ‘spin the bottle’ with elementary school children.” To Friedman, “Americanah,” a prizewinning novel by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about the immigrant experience, is “a horrible piece of garbage.” Reading from his own file on the book, he listed off its problems: “Attempted suicide, immigration fraud, promiscuity, infidelity, abortion, racism, sex, critical race theory.”

For months Friedman has battled the Clay County school board over books, even becoming a conservative folk hero when his antics at a school board meeting drew censure. This week, when Friedman attempted to read from the Mindy McGuinnis novel “Heroine,” about the opioid crisis, board members cut off his microphone, telling him there were children present. When he attempted to keep reading, two police officers escorted him from the podium.

Yet a newer board member has frequently taken his side, recently describing “every single book we’ve banned” as “filthy, filthy pornography” and adding, “People who tell you different have not read the books, period.”

Recently, the board met to revise its book policy — but a school district official said Friedman would complicate the task.

“Mr. Friedman’s erratic and inconsistent challenges make it impossible for us to predict and devise a solution,” the school district’s chief academic officer, Roger Dailey, told the board during its Sept. 26 workshop. “I don’t know that there is a way to satisfy him.”

More than 60% of all book challenges nationwide in the 2021-2022 school year came from just 11 people. In this context, the volume of Friedman’s challenges carry weight far beyond his own district — and he’s only picked up the pace since.

“He’s been incredibly successful,” said Tasslyn Magnusson, who researches school book bans for the literary free-speech group PEN America and considers Friedman one of the biggest players in a movement she sees as attacking public education. “He’s by far the best example of how this is not about the books, but this is about destroying the system.”

Friedman’s allies, too, say he is making an outsized impact. He is “an amazing person, very patient, compassionate, and really wanted to dig into the issue of the books,” said Elana Yaron Fishbein, the founder of No Left Turn in Education, which has a list of books it deems “problematic.” Friedman is the group’s Florida chapter head; with his master list of every book challenged in every district, Fishbein said, he “really went above and beyond.”

Friedman is not the only Jew who is active in the book-challenge movement. There is Fishbein, an Israeli-born mother and a former employee of the Philadelphia Jewish federation who founded No Left Turn in Education in 2020 to combat what she says is “a leftist agenda” in public and private schools. And Brooke Weiss, a Jewish mother in Charlotte, North Carolina, is a lead organizer in Moms For Liberty. Weiss told JTA she has never challenged a book herself, but she helped put together the group’s first-ever conference earlier this year, attended by several Republican presidential candidates.

Yet Friedman, who is involved in both groups, stands out for the sheer volume and intensity of his challenges; he is responsible for more than a third of all challenges in Florida, and for 94% of the challenges in his district, which has acceded to hundreds of his requests to pull books and has removed more books than any other in the state as a result. He insists that his efforts are on behalf of children like his own, whom he pulled from public school when they lived back in New York out of concerns about what the child was learning there.

“I want all lessons in all schools to respect innocence,” Friedman told JTA.

Friedman said his father was a Navy veteran who worked printing art for periodicals, while his mother worked a variety of jobs including as an accountant, seamstress and Yiddish teacher. He celebrated his bar mitzvah in Jerusalem, visiting the Western Wall. His parents, who are still alive, raised him “Conservative, leaning Orthodox” — he now participates in Jewish life via his local Chabad-Lubavitch center — and they imparted other values, too.

“My house that I grew up in was filled with books, and I had unfettered access to everything,” Friedman said. “I was the kind of guy who would stay close to librarians. The library was my happy place.”

Now, looking back, he says the unfettered access wasn’t always to his benefit. He has challenged “Slaughterhouse-Five,” the classic by Kurt Vonnegut about the bombing of Dresden during World War II, which he said he wrongly appreciated as a 12-year-old. “When I read it I had no regard for my own innocence,” he said.

Friedman attended multiple colleges in the New York area and worked as a construction manager in New York. He became radicalized by what he saw in public schools a decade ago, when his wife’s son entered kindergarten on Long Island. Schools in New York and around the country had recently adopted the Common Core, a set of educational standards meant to unify and improve what is taught across districts and states.

The standards had drawn backlash from conservatives who saw them as trampling on the principle of local control of schools. (People from across the ideological spectrum also argued that — in language presaging the book-ban movement — the standards were not always “age-appropriate” for children.)

Friedman said the standards caused his now-stepson to experience “considerable harm,” declining to offer specifics. The couple pulled him from public school and enrolled him in an evangelical Christian school that had eschewed the Common Core. The school’s outlook was also new for Friedman’s wife, who was raised Catholic, and the religious approach was not his own — “I was born a Jew. I will die a Jew,” Friedman said — but the family loved the school. When he saw Fishbein talking about No Left Turn on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show following the 2020 racial justice protests, he knew he had found his new cause.

Friedman moved his family from New York to Florida during the pandemic, “in pursuit of less tyrannical, more favorable governance and in the spirit of liberty.” (He noted that while he doesn’t regret the move, he does miss his family and “the pizza.”) His arrival in Florida came just as DeSantis was making “parents’ rights” a legislative priority. The timing was perfect for him to inaugurate No Left Turn’s presence in that state.

When Friedman and his family moved to Florida, he made the decision to put his son — now in high school — back in public school, believing that his evangelical education had given him “a very good moral base” that would insulate him from danger. But he forbade his stepson from ever using the school library and threw himself into monitoring the library’s contents.

There were so many parents out there, Friedman reasoned, who didn’t have time to thoroughly monitor their children’s media consumption like he did. Even if most of those parents might be fine with their kid reading the occasional racy book passage, some might not be.

“It’s not the kids that have a wicked dark sense of humor like I was,” he said, describing the child he pictures in his head when he files his challenges. “It’s for the sheltered little people who have parents that are so concerned with their souls that they don’t want them harmed.”

Friedman soon began reading school library books in his spare time, searching for objectionable content he could denounce, and scouring negative online reviews for more dirt on the books. He has turned the book challenge process into a science, filing flurries of official request forms — often with only one or two words of objection listed on them — which, under state law, must be considered by a formal review committee. He also has the ability to appeal any decision the committee makes, and usually does, if the decision doesn’t involve removing the book.

Recently, he says he landed a local job — but he has kept up the book challenges. “Employment has not slowed me,” he said. “I have the time to devote because I am a very motivated and determined person, and also because I don’t eat or sleep as I ought to.”

For the book challenges Friedman doesn’t author, he volunteers to serve on the committee that will decide their fates, as a parent representative. He then attends public board meetings to hammer home his objections in person; he went viral last year when he attempted to read aloud from a memoir by author Alice Sebold at one board meeting, as part of his justification for why he wanted it removed from the district.

As Friedman began reciting Sebold’s graphic accounting of a sexual assault, the board cut off his mic, warning him not to read “pornography” during a meeting being streamed to the public. “Hush your mouth and listen,” the school board attorney instructed him. This was hypocrisy, Friedman thought: If he can’t read a book aloud at a public board meeting because it’s pornographic, why should that same book be available in public school libraries?

Thanks in part to Friedman’s inspiration, reading objectionable book passages aloud at school board meetings has since become a tried-and-true tactic for activists who want books removed. Recent legislation in Florida even encourages such behavior by requiring boards to remove the book if they cut off such a reading for obscenity concerns.

The intensity of the efforts to ban books in Clay County has alarmed some educators there.

“One of the courses that I teach is on the Holocaust,” a district history teacher said during a school board meeting last year, speaking against the district’s mass book removals spurred on by Friedman. “Do I need to paint you a picture?”

A picture is exactly what Friedman didn’t like about the illustrated version of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” which was adapted by Ari Folman and David Polonsky and published in 2018 by the foundation that controls the diary’s copyright. In an image inspired by a passage in Frank’s original diary, she shares a brief memory of same-sex attraction, which was unacceptable to Friedman.

“The fact that little Anne Frank once had some lesbian thoughts that made their way into her diary, does that help a kid learn the horrors of Holocaust or inhumanity? No. So what is it helping the kid learn?” he asked. Employing a term, sometimes used as part of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, that describes adults training children to accept sexual abuse, he added, “As far as I’m concerned, it’s grooming.”

Friedman’s opposition to the book distinguishes him from Fishbein, who said she supports only “some” of Friedman’s challenges, such as one for the frequently challenged graphic novel “Gender Queer.” The Anne Frank adaptation is a different story: “We do not oppose the use of this book in schools,” she said. Friedman himself has taken to clarifying, in his challenges, that he is not acting on behalf of No Left Turn even as he continues to use an email address associated with the group.

Yet his campaign against “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” has caught on. Since Friedman first pushed his district to review the book this past winter, another Florida district removed it outright after it was challenged by a Moms For Liberty member there. Last month, a school in Texas fired a teacher who reportedly read it aloud to her eighth-grade students.

Critics of Friedman’s movement say it builds on a history of censorship that has always boded ill for the Jews. Copies of Jewish texts have been burned by antisemitic regimes throughout history, including France in the 1200s and the Roman Inquisition in the 1500s. The Nazis led a campaign not only to burn Jewish books, but also to wipe out what they deemed “degenerate art” — which often meant, if not works by Jews, then modernist pieces the regime considered to be vulgar or not generally supportive of their aims.

“There are parallels with book burnings,” Aaron Herschel Shapiro, an instructor of Jewish American literature at Middle Tennessee State University, told JTA about the contemporary movement. “The rhetoric alone makes that clear. The books, and the ideas they contain, are framed as some sort of cultural contagion that must be purged. That’s a bit on the nose, no?”

The Association of Jewish Libraries has come out against the movement that Friedman represents. “Book bans result in the suppression of history and distortion of readers’ understanding of the world around them,” the group said in a statement last year.

Despite the fact that at least one Moms For Liberty chapter has quoted Hitler in its communications, Weiss says she sees her movement as actually safeguarding Jewish stories and students. She became involved in Moms for Liberty after her daughter was asked, on a quiz about the Octavia Butler novel “Kindred,” to compare slavery and the Holocaust; the correct answer was that slavery was “just as horrible over a much longer duration,” which Weiss said was “Holocaust-minimizing.” Still, she said, “Even my mother has made the claim that this organization is antisemitic.”

Some of the most prominent Jews in the book-banning movement reject any uncomfortable historical resonances. “If we are talking about removing ‘Gender Queer’ from the school, why does that not work out well for the Jews?” Fishbein said. “What does that have to do with Jews or not Jews?”

Friedman, too, rejects the criticism, which he said in an email is coming from “misinformed people that feel it’s a precursor to the next Krystallnacht,” referring to the pogrom that is considered the start of the Holocaust.

“When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you, Andrew, represent your Jewish publication, the JTA, you might feel that everything on earth is about Jewishness,” he said. “The only thing Jewish about my efforts is that they seem to connect with our people’s passion for justice.”

Friedman is continuing his challenges at a full pace, and told the board at its September meeting that he would continue doing so until it established “a rubric and a guideline” for how to better deal with content he believes is “pornographic.” This month, he filed one for Antonio Iturbe’s young-adult Holocaust novel “The Librarian of Auschwitz.” The book is based on the true story of the Jewish Auschwitz survivor Dita Kraus, who as a teenager guarded a slim volume of smuggled books in the death camp’s children’s unit so that the kids would have something to read. Kraus is still alive today.

Friedman’s challenge to the book, which he shared with JTA, doesn’t mention Kraus’ quest to protect children’s books from Nazis. Instead, he quotes from sections describing nude, emaciated Auschwitz prisoners and Jewish corpses, passages which he believes are inappropriate for all age levels. A message to the board further articulating his objections suggests that his main issue with the book is that it mentions the Holocaust at all.

“Unsupervised forays into the horrors of the Holocaust can be traumatizing for children,” he writes. “They are almost certain to have some impact on a child. I wouldn’t necessarily expect this impact to be positive.” Elsewhere he repeats his familiar objections: “PROTECT CHILDREN,” he writes in all caps. “DAMAGED SOULS.”

Emily Knox, a University of Illinois professor who researches book challenges, told JTA the movement’s ambitions are inherently at odds with learning about the Holocaust.

“The issue with challengers is that they want books to be pure. And so what they will say is, ‘Why would someone put this terrible thing in a book?’” she said. “But it’s impossible to have a clean book on the Holocaust. That’s not something that exists, unless you decenter the Jewish experience in the Holocaust.”

New laws on the horizon would open the door to even more book challenges. Over the summer, Florida passed a new law that allows any county resident, not just parents, to challenge any book in the district. If even a single challenge claims a book contains sexual content, that book would have to be pulled immediately until a further review can be taken.

One book that Friedman personally says he doesn’t plan to challenge is a Holocaust work that has become a symbol of the broader book-ban movement. Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir “Maus,” which relays the experiences of his father’s survival of the Holocaust, last year was removed from a middle school lesson plan in Tennessee after the board objected to some of its illustrations, and has been on the chopping block in other districts in Missouri and Iowa. But just like with “The Diary of Anne Frank,” Friedman has positive memories of reading the book as a teen.

“I absorbed it immediately. I thought it was fantastic,” Friedman recalled. “As far as graphic novels go, and history lessons at the same time, it’s probably one of the very best.”

Still, he said, he’s fine with local efforts to remove the book from schools — even if it comes at a cost to Jews.

“That’s local control,” he said. “That’s the way it’s supposed to work. Even if their reasons are racist, even if they want that book gone because they don’t want any sympathy for Jews and they hate them, that’s local control.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Bruce Friedman has filed more than 3,000 book challenges. In fact, he has filed hundreds, but maintains a master list of all book challenges filed across the country which totals more than 3,000.

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angelsaxis · 6 months

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zionists saying that their apartheid ethnostate is the only place in the world that's safe for jewish people meanwhile they harass the shit out of ultra orthodox anti zionists they harass the shit out of diaspora jewish folks who are anti zionist they forced birth control on ethiopian jewish women and they clearly didn't give a shit about the igbo jews in nigeria when they helped the nigerian state wage war on all of Biafra. so.

#angel posts #something tells me that if jewish people from non white diaspora started trying to get into israel #they'd have a problem w that

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spacelazarwolf · 1 year

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Hey.

Curious non-Jew here with a question or two.

Sorry if I’m interrupting anything.

I’m just curious.

You describe yourself as an italki Jew, what exactly is italki? I’m assuming Italian but I genuinely don’t know.

I know there are loads of different groups of Jewish peoples (Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Cochin Jews, Mizrahi Jews (some people group them in with the Sephardic Jews), Ethiopian Jews (apparently they call themselves Beta Israel?), Nigerian Jews, Karaite Jews, etc. among MANY others I haven’t mentioned).

But I’ve never heard of Italki.

Could you perhaps elaborate on it?

If it’s okay for me to ask.

I’m just curious

And I don’t wish to come across as prying.

no worries! i have a tag that i’ll put on this post where i have posts that talk about that.

#ask avishai #italki jew

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black-star-kunzite · 9 months

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The Strain has such a solid premise and pilot episode but like what the fuck is everyone on. Like the background is Sci-Fy fantastical dystopian but the main characters are on some Days of Our Lives rp bullshit + a fuckass child character that was perfectly designed to be the supreme Headass Then Thomas Eichorst is like the most interesting villain but the series keeps edging the audience when it comes to killing him like this mf fuckin “I’ll get you next time Jew” skedaddles off intro the fucjing sewers every other episode which is cool n all but like give me someone else to bounce off of him???? Like there can’t only be one ultra dick devourer there can be like a super mega dick inhaler or just someone else idk? Also Augustin is literally the most interesting character to me and he honestly gets cool shit but like nothing that feels like growth or change or even acknowledgement of being a static person. ALSO the Nigerians in this show don’t even feel like NYC Nigerians lmao they’re just New Yorkers. And I understand that the characters are supposed to be a group of insane ppl fighting a losing battle but like I feel their choices are in the right direction but still fucking stupid. I do appreciate the disaster bisexual character that is Dutch but it’s subsumed by Nora’s “mother” archetype to all the men in this show like are y’all not gonna dog the shit out of eph for continuing to be fuckign jackass and bad father or continue to enable him and his shitter son lmao. Also how you gonna have both a love hate square with your dead(partially)wife. Also the Born kinda raw with it

#the strain #idk I hope it gets a bit better but ima still watch this #the monster design and practical effects go fuckign stupid oml #the vamps don’t feel as threatening as they were in the beginning ngl

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divinum-pacis · 10 months

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June 28, 2023: Nigerian Muslim women and children attend Eid al-Adha prayers at an open field in Lagos, Nigeria. Eid al-Adha, or Feast of Sacrifice, marks the willingness of the Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham to Christians and Jews) to sacrifice his son. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

#religion #islam #muslims #women #children #people #eid al adha #nigeria #divinum-pacis

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beardedmrbean · 2 months

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Hey I was trying to find what ancestry which it comes to tribes most African Americans have and your mutual (I think helped) https://www.tumblr.com/theconstitutionisgayculture/693392069742542849

And I found out the Yoruba are the majority of North American African slaves ancestry. And they also the biggest tribe in Nigeria

Is it wrong I went “OOOOOOOOOOOOH” as I saw one Nigerian woman that look just like my late godmother and now I know why.

Just wondering despite the dna ancestry this isn’t taught to Africa Americans, especially it would help end the whole pan Africa thing

…Though Nigerians would have to deal with annoying ass black activists Americans, they probably going struggle some benin with some Dahomey ancestry for that.

But I found out the Mandinka tribe make up most of southern United state slavery ancestry. I mean like in New Orleans and even in Brazil. And tbh I know something was different about Louisianan blacks

Well at least we know why New Orleans Creoles are raging capitalists

It the Mansa Musa blood flowing in them.

You know with the whole new Princess and the frog theme ride. Disney made up new lore and they confirm Tiana open up her own company that still exist today. I kinda want to write a story where her descendants does a dna test and found out they have Mandinka ancestry hence their great great grandmother whole business idea…obviously it other reasons but still funny.

Not mutuals but @theconstitutionisgayculture are in the same circle

As for which group, it would be whichever ones were closest to the Dahomey and whoever else was picking people up and selling them since there were lots of them going on.

10 or so million people need several suppliers, even if only like 3-400,000 of them came to the US (people seem to forget that like >90% went to SA, not that that makes things better but spread the blame please) Mexico started late and just enslaved it's indigenous population, in what would be called a genocide today I think.

Dahomey is right there in the Benin spot where we got 16% it looks like SE Africa is news to me.

Not sure if the various DNA tests can pinpoint a particular group, maybe to the level of "Bantu" which is a incredibly broad spread of people so hopefully better than that.

You said Yourba

The Yoruba people are a West African ethnic group who mainly inhabit parts of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo.

That would fit for Dahomey at least, cuz Benin.

Here's the Mandinka, which that oddly enough jives with Django Unchained

Seeing a lot of Fula in there, that was the group that did the Fula jihads so forcibly converted to Islam, shipped to the Americas, or possibly castrated but absolutely sold to Arabic groups were their choices then.

Interesting.

This is mostly me just putting up what I'm seeing so far if you're confused it's ok so am I.

Well at least we know why New Orleans Creoles are raging capitalists It the Mansa Musa blood flowing in them.

New Orleans is a odd cross section of the US population, even way back when.

It was still racist AF, but the French connection created some odd population pockets,

Louis Armstrong with his Lithuanian Jewish neighbors who well.

In his memoir, Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans, La., the Year of 1907, he described his discovery that this family was also subject to discrimination by "other white folks" who felt that they were better than Jews: "I was only seven years old but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the white folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for."

Guy wore a Star of David always, in their honor they made a big difference for him, but I'm stopping there or I'll go into tangent land.

place is just strange, and the locals wouldn't have it any other way

That could be fun, if you do it be sure and send it this way so I can read it, I may wind up totally confused but that's ok.

#zoomer huey anon

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