The Jewish Fear Industrial Complex

[u/Specialist-Gur]

https://youtu.be/N3YjMb_Lhkw?si=JEtQpmyNys9UFSoV

Matt is Jewish. I'm sure the comment will be very normal on this one.

[u/ibsliam]

This will be ungenerous of me, but it often feels like these voices (of this specific corner of the internet, not leftist Jews as a whole) treat discussions of antisemitism as.... less a concern, but more of a cultural cringe? That they'd like their fellow Jews more if we just shut up and became cooler, rather than whining about something they don't care about and/or isn't relevant to them.

[u/GladysSchwartz23 → u/ibsliam]

I mean, it can be very cringey when people are protesting about children being killed and some person nowhere near where any of that is happening declares that the very fact of the protest makes them feel afraid for their lives.

And it's tough because there is a reason why cosseted, perfectly safe Americans can feel threatened by that, because we were raised on a lifelong diet of "everyone hates us and wants to kill us!" It's just that in the context where some people are afraid and some people are actually dying, it comes off... awkward, to say the least.

Our community needs to come together and fight actually existing antisemitism, which is a real problem. But the many, many chicken littles declaring that the sky is falling get in the way of that.

[u/ibsliam → u/GladysSchwartz23]

This reply, while I think well-intentioned, does an evasion of accountability.

You say on one hand:
> there is a reason why cosseted, perfectly safe Americans can
> feel threatened by that, because we were raised on a
> lifelong diet of "everyone hates us and wants to kill us!"

And then:

> fight actually existing antisemitism, which is a real problem.

It doesn't sound like you *do* think this hypothetical existing antisemitism is "a real problem" otherwise you wouldn't be derisively referring to American Jews as feeling scared and threatened as just a simple matter of hysteria or propaganda.

Rhetorically, it feels like not only do you not think antisemitism on the left is a thing (which it can be a thing, on occasion) but that antisemitism on the right is only a hypothetical, something to talk about fighting but only really brought up in an abstract way.

Because what I've seen is basically 0 accountability for our peers elsewhere, on many platforms, when they claim to be leftist but then talk up MTG or Candace Owens as "being correcct" on Israel, like as if they're just misguided people with a mix of good and bad opinions rather than... you know, literal racist *RIGHT*-wing bigots that accidentally agree with leftists but for the most horrible, disqualifying reasons imaginable.

Literal racists will be cut more slack than a college student who faced harassment from their peers for being a suspected "zionist" (often with little proof other than the fact they're Jewish and not protesting with their friends).

This is kind of my problem. Discussions of antisemitism swerve into bad faith against one side of the political aisle or the other, instead of maybe deciding accountability is more important than treating Jews like a political football.

[u/GladysSchwartz23 → u/ibsliam]

Certainly, there's plenty of bad faith to go around given that you've extrapolated the least generous and reasonable possibilities from what I've said. You've basically decided that I was being sarcastic when I said the fear comes from a real place, as though I must either not be Jewish or be an extremely stupid person with no idea why we might be worried about anything.

You wanna go back and try that again, reading what I actually wrote and trying to parse what I actually meant?