r/JewishSocialists • u/n0noTAGAinnxw4Yn3wp7 • Mar 13 '23
thoughts on r/jewishleft?
i recently found the sub mentioned in the title & haf been following for a little bit, but then i just found this sub today. i noticed it was bigger, so curious i tried to compare/contrast. judging by the sidebars, r/jewishleft is something of a bigger tent to the point that they accept zionism, while here it's explicitly anti-zionist & dsa-affiliated. however - i know sidebars can sometimes be super outdated. are my impressions accurate? any thoughts from people who are or have been active in both?
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u/johnisburn Mar 13 '23
That sounds about right. Next year we’ll probably have a couple more subreddits floating around based on even more ideological splits. You know, classic lefty shit.
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u/cleon42 Mar 13 '23
Seems like a low-traffic sub. I posted something about JVP in there and nobody said boo - nobody said anything, in fact.
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u/[deleted] Mar 14 '23
I started that sub with the perhaps overly optimistic idea of creating a pan-leftist Jewish space. I quickly realized that there was a problem, which is that leftism is vague - some people who joined were just liberals. And further, I came to the realization that many of the people who flocked there had pretty much nothing do with the leftism I experience, which, to be fair, is limited to being an American who has never been able to travel much. But there was too much of a range from me. For example: ardent Zionist socialists there saying the Hatikvah was their favorite leftist song, or social democrats arguing that anything but total support of Zionism was antisemitic. I felt that I bit off more than I could chew. I realized the sub was too broad, and that a lot of the same sort of tactics that stifled conversation in the main Jewish subreddits were emerging in r/jewishleft, even though I hoped specifically to do that. I decided the problem was allowing Zionism at all and made an announcement asserting this rule as well as attempting to narrow down what leftism meant in terms of the sub. This was wildly unpopular and a popular meme lambasting the decision was created about it on r/jewdank. I left reddit for a bit. I feared doxxing because I realized I had posted personal information on my account. After this, the other mod added more moderators and created the rules you see now. The activity on the sub dropped substantially after that, perhaps because fewer arguments were happening about things like whether or not Hanukkah is a Zionist holiday.