Note: None of these things is simple and reducible to even one blog post and I won't make believe it is, there aren't two sides, that stupid question as sung by The Weavers is as much a part of the problem as choosing a bad side of it. That is what is demanded of me AND I WON'T DO IT.
I should also note that the "hate mail" didn't come from one of my regular trolls, it came from someone else. I don't want anyone to attribute it to them.
AND THE RECENT DISTORTION OF "ANTISEMITISM" as a tactic of inhibition among those with any sense of propriety is aiding in that rise. I warned of that the first time I slammed the transparent dishonesty of the so-called International Holocaust Remembrance Association's mounting and political-legal promotion of a legal cover-up of the crimes of the Israeli government. I predicted that that world-wide, obviously very well funded campaign to cover-up for the apartheid and genocide of Israel would backfire and empower the Jew haters. Those haters are generally also haters of many other groups and many of those hatreds are even far more dangerously rising right now.
I don't recall the many so-called experts on the Holocaust, many of them with superb academic credentials, who were a part of that cover-up effort having the foresight to predict that reaction which is setting in so dangerously here in the US and around the world. But, then, my view of such credentialing is among those things that has lowered, drastically, too. I don't have any respect for those who make a career and living off of the now 80 year past genocide by the Nazis who refuse to identify and condemn genocides that are happening right now, not even those who were successful in defending themselves against what is in effect a SLAP lawsuit in Britain. Not anymore, I don't. Unless such a study is done in order to inform and change the MORAL lives of People moving forward in order to prevent and stop such mass murder no matter who commits them, they reduce the subject of it to a morbid and pointless antiquarian vulgarization of that study in ways that dishonor its victims.
It has certainly not helped that in the same period in which the so-called IHRA and the Israeli government are bringing about the conditions that have given rise to much of the increase in antisemitism we are witnessing - which is part of a general rise in racism in many places and against many groups. It certainly doesn't help at all that the notorious Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and their various millionaire and billionaire associates have been exposed as crude, vulgar racists and what Norman Finkelstein has aptly called "Jewish supremacists" even as their associations with and suspected agency for the Israeli government has gained currency. The responsibility for the consequences of that certainly don't fall on those who notice that documented expression of it.
Not a little of the snark and angry citation of the phrase "chosen people" has been in response to the Jewish supremacy expressed in the dribs and drabs of e-mails from those criminals and their expression of it as testified to by their victims. The misunderstanding of any Scriptural notions of "chosenness" as some kind of intellectual or spiritual superiority that is inherited as this or that cluster of genes might be is widespread. Whatever "chosenness" came with some of the most onerous of moral obligations ever claimed by any People, anywhere. The idea that that "chosenness" was some free ride is, perhaps, to be expected among the fallible vessels that human beings are, and if that's forgotten the rest of the Jewish Scriptures are nothing but a record of those so "chosen" falling entirely short and losing everything because of it. It would be interesting if the Jewish Scriptures had held more of the documentation of the Hasmonean dynasty, both the ever more corrupt rulers and the corrupted Temple than were chosen to include in it but, then, the same can be said about the cut-off of Christian Scriptures at the late 1st century.*
It is rather hilarious for many white gentiles who snark about and angrily accuse Jews of believing in that, as a blanket accusation because if there is one thing that such tend to be it is believing in their own "chosenness" on other basis, such as a crude and vulgar conception of nationalism, ethnicity, superstitions developed from 19th century romantic linguistics and all of those mixed with a superstitious belief in natural selections and the pastiche of that current in the mid-20th century neo-Darwinian synthesis and, in the case of the United States, show-biz, hagiographic civics bullshit about American exceptionalism. If there is one thing about the Trump era, it is that any such notions based on anything should be entirely and forever obliterated and such claims banned from popular entertainment and suppressed in what passes as academic or journalistic scribblege and babbleage.
The worst of them, especially the dispensationalist-evangelical white-supremacists of the English speaking (and unfortunately more and more Spanish speaking ones) believe in it on an especially wacky reading of Scripture, or, rather, their distortion of the text of the KJV even as their Zionism is in order to get all of the Jews in one place, the better for them to be forced to convert or obliterated - something they have in common with Jewish Zionists. I will point out that at least they don't figure that Jews should be murdered on the basis of biology as the Nazis believed, though they want them to stop being Jews - which has quite a history of intersection with Zionism as elucidated by the theoreticians of Zionism.
I certainly don't think that either Epstein or Maxwell or others in their orbit held their ethnic, racist sense of superiority on the basis of Scripture but on the typical, post-WWII vulgar conceptions of biology which never had any scientific validity though its basis was the required framing of biology from at least the 1920s onward. I'm sure if they ever expressed themselves on what their beliefs were founded in they'd have explained it as genetic superiority, though that is entirely a matter of college-credentialed superistition as much as the superstition of "Aryan" supremacy as biologically explained by the Nazis was. Not an insignificant part of that was based, firmly, on the entirely conventional science of such giants of pre-war Darwinism as Karl Pearson, Eugen Fischer and Charles Davenport. That such superstition in science didn't die with the revelations of the crimes of the Nazis is far more telling about the problems of science than it is of Scripture.
The extent to which some Jews have expressed and hold that kind of supremacist view of themselves may be annoying but until it becomes a problem for those in other groups, it is merely that. Though it should never be forgotten that People who are the target of such arrogance will react badly towards it. Just as the superstition of white supremacy is a problem because of how those who hold that superstition act towards other People, it's to be expected that those who come up on the short end of that stick will react with anger towards it. And you can count on that to tend towards over-reaction and, People not generally liking to deal with complexity, in an over-general and unjust way. The reaction to injustice tends, in my observation, to trend towards injustice, too. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the Jewish supremacy, when not a consequence of biological superstition, was not an over-reaction to antisemitism on the part of non-Jews. But those who are the focus of such chauvinism and bigotry can, also, use it to avoid that over-reaction and that should be encouraged.
Though this is all intimately related to the crimes of the ethno-apartheid democracy of the Israeli state, it is far more complicated than just that. I have every confidence that the Epstein-Maxwell-Wexner pedophile rape and, certainly, blackmail ring is related to at least a couple, if not several nations intelligence services - THEY'D CERTAINLY SELL WHAT THEY COULD TO ANYONE WHO WOULD PAY THEM FOR IT - the suspicion that the Israeli intelligence services were involved is entirely rational and understandable. But the problem, as with notions of American exceptionalism, Aryan supremacy, many varying species of "blood based" national supremacist chauvinism are certainly reproduced in Zionism as, in that massive irony, the bloody crimes of all of them. That is inevitable when such supermacist superstition is current in any given place. Israel's is just another species of that AND IT IS NOTABLE THAT MANY, MANY JEWS REJECT THAT AS DO MANY GENTILES WHEN IT COMES TO THE RELEVANT SUPERSTITIONS THAT THEY MIGHT FALL INTO EVIL UNDER.
The overarching sin in this is the sin of generalization which is related to the sins of pride, arrogance, bearing false witness and prejudice. All of those are encouraged these days in the media, in popular entertainment and by the amorality of modernism. Modernism has encouraged that as did previous amoral or immoral framings. It needs to be overcome as much as any framing of the past which produced evil needs to be. I have enormous regard and affection for the sadly gone Jewish Labour Bund and its allies, though its modernist tendencies give me pause just as some of the modernist tendencies in Christian theology have.
That aside, I certainly wish the like of the Workers Circle and its allies well in their attempt to revive the Yiddish language and culture, if I were younger I might learn the language, myself. I think the Yiddish theater as much as the later Federal Theater Project is what made the best of mid-20th century theater and whatever few adult tendencies in the movies and TV happen, happen. I think the lack of both of those in the past seventy years is why so much popular culture in the United States sucks so much. I wish the Labour Bund had succeeded and not gotten so fragmented and sidelined into Marxism and blindsided by Zionism but it ran full into Bolshivism, Stalinism and Nazism so that's in the past. We move forward whether we like it or not. I have some hope for a successful alliance of anti-Zionism in both its religious and secular sides. Though not under a modernist framing of secularism I don't trust that, at all.
* I've pointed out before that the eminent American essayist Marilynne Robinson, addressing the popular and modernist slamming of the Jewish Scriptures has asked what the superficial regard of the Christian Scripture would be if it covered as many centuries of Christian history, including such ignominies as the Crusades, the crimes of the age of conquest, etc. And I'd ask about such a compendious view of the real nature of secular modernism collected into one place. Though one thing is certain, modernism has, by far, the largest death toll associated with it.
