You don’t think my thinking that the right doesn’t actually care about antisemitism is so cynical though?
I think Jews are a convenient minority for both the left and the right. They’re victims when we need them to be, oppressors when we want them to be, white when they need to be, and not white when we need them to be something else. Both the left and the right care about anti-Semitism when it’s in their interest to care about it.
Also communists and socialists, and bankers and capitalists … as needs the moment. 
I don’t think it’s designed that way, either, but I think that unless handled carefully, that’s a very unlikely unintended result. People are much more sensitive to attacks against themselves than they are to attacks against other people, and if they feel - even mistakenly - that they’re under attack, then most people’s first instinct is to push back.
I think cynicism is warranted there. Which is not to say individual people don’t care, but Republicans making a fuss about it are largely trying to attack the left. Whereas the left cares as a matter of ideology, or at least they are supposed to.
Too successful to get much sympathy from the left, and too different to get much sympathy from the right. Jews are unlucky enough to be considered white by the people who (only) want to help minorities, and not white by the people who are openly prejudiced against minorities.
Yeah, this is pretty much my feeling.
And to bring into focus of this thread - too successful for me to feel that oppression of Jews is a big concern relative to many many many others. It is high on my list both because of my Jewish identity and awareness of history. At risk of Gowinization German Jews went from assimilated and successful to genocide target very quickly. But I am personally right now more concerned that “never again” is not restricted to never again Jews as the target. So there should awareness of, recognition of, calling out of, antisemitism, but oppression of free speech, targeting of other “others” should be more the spotlight. It’s not a pyramid but some things are currently bigger deals.
For some reason as I’m reading through all this, all I can think about are anecdotes. When I was in grad school we did one of those stepping exercises, and one of the questions was, “have you ever been treated as inferior because of the color of your skin?” I am white as hell, but if I am to take that question literally, I am pale as fuck and was hounded about it mercilessly throughout middle school and high school. I’m allergic to the sun so there is fuck-all I can do about it. So that’s how I ended up standing in a column with a bunch of Black people. I’m still embarrassed about it but I just took it literally and wasn’t really thinking about it.
The deference hierarchy exists for a reason. I’m a member of a writers group. We have three women and five men. I’m probably the most vocal from a feminist perspective. We are all good friends. A male writer in the group tried to write in an incest subplot in a somewhat hamfisted way, about an uncle exploiting his thirteen year old niece.
I have:
- 38 years’ experience as a writer
- Direct experience with sexual abuse by a family member at that age
- 10 years experience working for an agency that serves child victims
- Recently completed state-mandated training on perpetrator psychology
Everyone was well aware of all of this.
I went to the meeting intending to give my friend some information he could use to write more authentically about this issue.
What I got was… Interrupted. By another man. Completely railroaded, when it was my designated time to talk. He agreed with me, but he thought it was more important in that moment for his voice to be heard than mine. And because he is somewhat fragile, I didn’t point it out. But it hurt my feelings.
It is not the first such incident in that group and he is not the only one in that group to unconsciously privilege the perspective of men over women. I’ve seen similar things happen on this board through the years. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some allies. I am not asking them to categorically shut the hell up.
It’s just… Think about what you’re doing. Consider the context. That’s all I ask.
Sadly I think that is true.
I think women are also a convenient minority for the left. I’ve seen them excoriate sexual abusers until it was a Dem and then all the usual rape apologism came out. I don’t view liberal men as meaningfully less sexist than conservative men, although they are at least better on abortion.
I think the appeal of benevolent sexism for women is that it’s ostensibly about protecting women, and a lot of women need, or feel a need for, protection. Benevolent sexism turns up a lot in romance novels. Looking at my WIP it’s a fine line to walk between “protective” and “benevolently sexist.” I come down on the side of give the people what they want, but turn a critical lens on it.
To @Wesley_Clark’s point earlier, I voted for Biden despite the sexual assault allegations against him. I don’t know whether it’s true or not. I voted for him anyway because of his policy track record on women and sexual violence. I’ve never liked him, I still don’t like him, and I probably never will, regardless of whether the allegations are true or false. But I’m not a single-issue voter anyhow.
I imagine a lot of conservative women are also not single-issue voters.
I don’t usually agree with Der Trihs but we agree that ascribing singular motives to classes of people is not generally helpful for understanding issues.
Also, if something feels like manipulation - a common issue with teaching - people simply won’t trust the motives or honesty of the person doing the teaching. They are likely to outright ignore the intended lesson even if they realize what it is because they’ll think it’s a lie or a setup. Even if they agree with it the result is that they are likely to make them wonder if they were wrong all along. It turns into anti-teaching, effectively, where people listen to what you have to say and presume the opposite is probably true.
Lowering grades like that is obviously something that never happened. Everybody’s responding to Der Trihs’s ridiculous anecdote as though it were real. There’s no cite for it, literally nothing more than “trust me, bro.”
What, why? Because there’s no such thing as jerks who happen to have left wing politics, so it categorically can’t have happened? The assertion that “people of my political persuasion are superhuman beings who never engage in injustice” doesn’t have a high record of accuracy.
Also, how would I cite something that is yes, is not only an anecdote but not even mine? And I do in fact trust my brother. But I never even implied it was something I personally experienced, just that it was the only thing I could recall that resembled what people were talking about.
Your brother’s anecdote just can’t be taken seriously. It never happened.
And you know this, how? Psychic powers?
Oh hell yes. Very common on pre-Elon Twitter to encounter left-wing men who switched from ‘feminist ally’ to spouting sexist abuse when you crossed them. Same with going straight back to tropes denigrating women as hysterical etc. Their feminism only exists as long as you fit their idea of a good woman.
Traditional conservatives mostly do benevolent sexism, which is far more tolerable, while the ‘new right’ includes an awful lot of embittered men who openly hate all women.
Does anyone really endorse doing this? It’s more in the nature of a bias we all have to guard against than an explicitly held belief, no?
The issue is that specific cultures have particular issues with antisemitism (and same with sexism, LGBTQ issues etc), and I see the left, and mainstream societies that have been greatly influenced by social justice ideas, refusing to address this, or denying it altogether. Maybe out of hesitancy to criticise a ‘more oppressed group’, maybe because they are (validly) worried about creating stigma against that group, maybe because the group lacks institutional power so they (wrongly) think that the group’s beliefs are not harmful to others.
IMO this is harmful in multiple ways: giving certain people a pass for their bad attitudes means they have no incentive to change them; members of more privileged groups feel resentful that they are held to a standard others are not, and it undermines the idea that those attitudes are never acceptable. And individuals can still do great harm, even if they belong to a group with little institutional power.
I don’t think endorsing this is what you mean by saying other concerns should get more of the spotlight. Assuming you mean ordinary prioritisation, and not ignoring lower priority issues altogether, then I agree with you. It’s the above attitudes that are the problem.
I actually do not see that much.
Pretty much across cultures there are both lots of individuals with antisemitic beliefs, and lots of people who whether or not they have antisemitic beliefs think that Israel equals Jews, who think, for example supporting all Israeli policies means being a great friend to Jews. That conflation happens even among some Jews. And the reverse applies.
Let’s make it very clear: “Jew” doesn’t equal “Israel” either direction. But many people think it does.
So being against Israel is often conflated with being against Jews, and being for Jews (against antisemitism) as being supportive of Israeli policies and actions, because that conflation is something so many do.
What you see is not an example of “oppression pyramid”; it is a result of that widely held confused thought process.
To clarify. Conflated both in the senses of confused with and generalized to.
I’m like 99% of the way there with you. And yet…
In college, I read an essay written by a teacher who was getting their class to understand why people follow unconscionable orders, and did so by threatening to kill their class pet and making them watch the pet die. Here’s a first-hand account from another teacher who decided to replicate the activity.
And there are teachers who have taught slavery by holding slave auctions in which Black kids are placed in the roles of slaves, and there are teachers who have used math problems full of grotesque racist stereotypes.
What I’m saying is, there are teachers who treat wisdom as their dump stat, and some of them are trying to teach about justice but really, really fuck it up.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some fool started the semester by making that claim about downgrading white dudes. I would be astonished if they were able to carry through on the threat–that nobody protested successfully to administration, and that it didn’t make the top story on Fox News for the next century.
I don’t disbelieve the initial claim, made by a fool of a teacher who was trying to make an important point and failed spectacularly. I absolutely don’t believe that the threat was successfully carried out. (Edit: note that @Der_Trihs never claimed that the threat was carried out. I think this might have happened as an “I’m gonna pretend I’ll kill the goldfish” lesson).
As for privilege walks, while I’ve seen the video of one, my impression was that it happened in a setting specifically for discussing issues of privilege–like, in a workshop or class on social justice, designed for college students or working professionals. While I’m sure some fool has tried that lesson in an inappropriate setting such as an elementary or middle school classroom, I’m also confident that that’s vanishingly rare. It goes counter to some fundamental principles of early education.
Here in Southern California, a few years ago, it was pretty dang common. High school social studies classes, middle school leadership elective type courses, etc.
But again, when you do it right, it’s not just a checklist of protected classes per federal law. It’s also things like “take two steps forward if when you were a kid both of your parents had cars; take one step forward if they shared a car; and take one step backwards if neither had a car”.
I want to second everything in this post.
I rarely see antisemitism, especially not “in these cultures”. I did once meet a Saudi boy at a college mixer who jumped away from me as if he’d been string when i told him i was Jewish. And i would guess that was cultural. But i don’t often run into members of the Saudi Arabian culture.
tedious caveats
And it’s not as if that’s true of every Arab. I’m volunteering with my Temple’s refugee resettlement project, and i visit a Syrian family weekly. They know that we are all Jews, and seem delighted to have us visit and help with learning English, babysitting their kids, etc.
I do see a lot of anti-Israeli sentiment on the left. That’s not usually antisemitism. I have a lot of friends who were active in their college pro-Palestinian encampments, and they are perfectly comfortable with Jews and Judaism.
Is there antisemitism out there? Sure. I once came home to find a swastika written into the dust. My sister went to a gas station that had a hand-made sign with a Star of David in the international “no” symbol. I know it’s out there. But it rarely affects my life.
Right now, rarely.
I am very conscious that right now is just right now. But this is where that hierarchy comes in - they may come for me, and the best way to prevent that is to do the little we can when they come for those who are not me, and not do nothing then. It is not only social justice to care about them; it is informed best interest. If they succeed coming for them then me and mine are somewhere next on the list. If they succeed for the current other then it is only a matter of time until they will come for me.