Pour encourager les autres
It worked for Elijah
Strictly speaking, Sauron is the Christian version of Sauron.
My first encounter with the whole “Khazar Jews” myth was Michael Chabon’s novel, Gentlemen of the Road, about a pair of Jewish mercenaries who end up working for the Khazar king. Been a long time since I read it, so I don’t recall the details of the plot, but I recall enjoying it as a light action novel.
If nowhere is safe, fuck it, I’m moving to Tahiti.
I think it was more that Israel was the place where we’d be able to fight back.
And the place that wasn’t going to say “you can’t come in, you’re Jewish.”
I think Switzerland’s safe. (Though they did drag their heels on admitting Jewish refugees during World War II.)
Yes, yes it has been “marketed” as a safe haven for Jews. Mainly, in my experience, by other Jews but with a side order of evangelicals (who I think mainly wanted the Jews around but living somewhere else so they didn’t have to actually be neighbors with them).
I question if a nation where the bus-stops feature bomb shelters is a “safe haven”. Yes, I realize that it is NOT raining missiles every day there, but apparently it’s like us in Tornado Alley worrying about twisters - it is something the populace needs to cope with more often than folks would like.
I also realize that a nation that is tolerant of Jews can in less than a human lifetime become hostile to them in a very murderous way (see early 20th Century Germany).
I’ve given up arguing this point in real life with people. The world is not, and never has been, a safe place for everyone, everywhere you go there is some sort of hazard, and it’s up to adults to make choices to the extent they are free to do so.
On the other hand, although North America has not always been the ideal place to be and there certainly was anti-Jewish bias during the 20th Century no one on this side of the planet was shoving Jews into boxcars or forcing them to relocate (no, the US did that to the Japanese, but that’s another thread…) As someone whose family lived through that century in the US we were pretty sure our government wasn’t going to be slaughtering us. So no, it wasn’t universal for Jews everywhere that Israel was the “one place”.
That said - it was certainly easier for European Jews to get to the Levant than to cross the Atlantic up through the 1940’s and into the early 50’s. Which is probably why so many wound up there.
I think you’re overstating the difference between the U.S. and Europe, at least to outsiders. To people who have just had immeasurable suffering imposed on them by white Christians, saying “But THIS white Christian country is safe!” is not that reassuring.
Besides, while being shot at you on a regular basis is hardly fun, it’s better than the utter helplessness of Jews in the face of institutional antisemitism. There, the best we could do was try to run. Here we can fight back. Here, we are in control of our own destiny.
I see what you are saying, but, on the other hand, here we are in the 21st century and Israel, too, is controlled by a dangerous right-wing government, even though Israel is a democratic country.
Yes, but to us insiders, Jews whose families had fled the pogroms of the late 19th Century to the US, the US looked safer than Israel did to us. Among other things, some people thought living physically further away from Europe would be safe and definitely the US is further away than the Levant.
Now, how a completely objective person would balance those two alternatives…? I don’t know. I can only speak for how it looks to me, and to a lesser extent what I remember from my grandparents who had been refugees seeking a safe haven.
I get it - my great-grandparents were part of the exact same migration from Eastern Europe to the United States at the turn of the 20th Century, and I don’t blame them at all. At the time, it was by far the most sensible choice. It was only my parents, in a burst of late-1960s’ idealism, who decided to immigrate three quarters of a century later.
But if my family had stuck around Europe instead, and had somehow survived, what choice would they have made? I don’t know.
By no means guaranteed, of course. My family has no Holocaust survivors; only Holocaust victims, and people who were very far away from Europe by the time the Holocaust happened.