What’s Up With the Jews? Read carefully......before posting

[gubbi]

Very interesting take on anti-semitism. I request members to read the entire article carefully before posting comments. If you dont, then better GTFO. Dont TROLL.

I am going to paste the entire article here..so excuse me....

What’s Up With the Jews?

It’s been an interesting week or two for Jews. Mel Gibson’s new film, “The Beaver,” opens nationwide in theaters and Jews must decide whether to pay good money to see a movie starring someone whose father is a Holocaust denier, and who has himself vilified Jews in public. In Cannes, the Danish movie director Lars von Trier rambles on at a press conference about sympathizing with Hitler, being annoyed with Israel and admiring Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer. Next day he recants, but it’s too late; he’s declared persona non grata at the film festival.

Then there is Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a French economist and politician who was poised to become France’s first Jewish president, imprisoned at Rikers Island after being accused of forcing sex on a chambermaid at a New York hotel. (Strauss-Kahn has now moved to a very constrained “house arrest” while awaiting arraignment, if he can find a house.) Meanwhile, on May 11 this newspaper publishes the results of a Pew Forum study that shows 67 percent of Reform Jewish households in the United States making more than $75,000 a year; only 31 percent of all households hit the same mark.

Then there are a few older stories that linger on and add to the mix. Designer John Galliano is facing trial in France and has been fired by Dior because, in the course of a drunken rant in a bar, he said to someone (who was not in fact Jewish) “I love Hitler and people like you would be dead.” Bad-boy Charlie Sheen abused various substances, cavorted with assorted women and trashed hotel-rooms for years and nothing much was done about it until he spewed anti-Semitic remarks in the direction of the Jewish producer of his hit TV show “Two and a Half Men.” In a short time he was fired and his role has been given to Ashton Kutcher, raised Catholic, but now heavily into Judaism and Kabala.

And of course there is the story that will live forever, even after its protagonist dies, the story of Bernie Madoff (a Strauss-Kahn lookalike, or is it the other way around?) who perpetrated the biggest scam in history (will he replace Meyer Lansky as the chief exhibit in the bad-guy Jewish Hall of Fame?) and ruined thousands of people, many of them fellow Jews.

The thing about these stories is that they all point in (at least) two directions. Sheen, Gibson, Galliano and Von Trier have paid dearly for their transgression against Jews; but that fact has also had some muttering on about Jewish power and influence in Hollywood and the arts. (“You can insult any ethnic group and get away with it, except for the Jews.&#8221 In the U.S. press and on some of the blogs, Strauss-Kahn is vilified as an elitist misogamist thug, but in France he is thought of as a victim of a political conspiracy and portrayed by some as a modern Alfred Dreyfus brought down just as he was on the brink of ascendancy to a position no Jew has ever attained.

The statistics that show Jewish households doing really well financially would seem to be good news for the Jewish community, but the Times story about the survey ended up featured on the Web site of Stormfront.org, where it was placed just below an advertisement for the latest David Duke video. The moral Stormfront draws is that “most honest people do not want to live off other people,” the latest installment of the very old accusation that Jews are parasitic blood suckers who infest and infect a society. The same thing has been said many times on many white supremacists Web sites about Madoff: “If one studies the history of the Jew, one will see how this race of vagabond parasites takes over a host and bleeds it dry as we are now being bled dry” (Vanguard News Network Forum).

So which is it? Jews are a success story, or Jews are a plague? Don’t mess with Jews, or blame Jews for everything in sight the moment you get drunk? Jews are victims (expulsions, pogroms, the Holocaust), or Jews are victimizers (rapacious bankers, shyster lawyers, land-grabbers and ethnic cleansers)? Jews are devils and sub-human vermin (a Nazi trope), or Jews are God’s chosen people?

The answer is all of the above and much more, for, as many before me have observed, the Jew as a cultural/ historical figure is oversaturated, which means that the meanings that accrue to him (or her, but mostly him) are in excess of any empirical record and accumulate like barnacles without any regard for the law of contradiction. Attitudes, especially negative ones, toward Jews flourish whether there are Jews around or not. Anti-Semitism survives in Poland even though most of its Jews have either fled or been killed. There is anti-Semitism in China, but few actual Jews.

An important part of the protean and shape-shifting history of anti-Semitism is illuminated by Matthew Biberman’s brilliant book “Masculinity, Anti-Semitism, and Early Modern English Literature.” Biberman traces the intertwined careers of two characterizations of the Jew — the Jew as devil, an impossibly strong alien being who blocks and destroys everything that is good, and the Jew as sissy, an effeminate, slight, pasty figure who stays in the background and assimilates, but who, because of his having disappeared into the woodwork, is able to rot it out from within. (This quick summary does not do justice to the richness of Biberman’s analysis.) So you can have the fierce barbaric Jew (Israel as the atom-bomb wielding destroyer of Arab armies, at least in 1967) and the insidiously bland Jew, the obsequious figure who, while no one’s looking, takes control of everything. That means that whatever a Jew does there are a number of pre-packaged, and often mutually exclusive, narratives in which to place him, and, by and large, they are not positive ones.

And that goes double for the Jewish nation. There is, as everyone knows, an ongoing debate about whether criticism of Israel can be separated from criticism of Jews, that is, from anti-Semitism. (See, for example, the comments on my two previous columns.) But it may be that the figure of the Jew is so highly, and complexly, charged that attempts to detach the political/military strategy of a nation from the ancient, entrenched and multiple images of its inhabitants — this is, after all, the Jewish state — are likely to fail from either direction. Israelis and their supporters will hear in any criticism of policy echoes of the diaspora, the blood-libel, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Third Reich’s final solution. Those who offer the criticism can never quite be sure that their distaste for Israel’s actions with respect to the Palestinians is entirely innocent of the influence of centuries of vilification. And that seems to be where we are.

 

[gubbi]

Here are two comments on this article which are fantastic !!
1.

Matt G
Oakland, CA
May 24th, 2011
9:37 am
As a thinking man, and a Jew, I don't think anti-semitism is much different from all other types of bigotry. It has the verisimilitude of a special, virulent form of prejudice, but on closer inspection (and it has been inspected, dissected, and analyzed ad nauseam), that perception is not the objective reality.

Humans as a group are naturally suspicious vis-à-vis foreigners - it is probably a biological adaptation for security. Most societies, until the United States came into being, were relatively culturally homogenous. A foreign group came along and was viewed with distrust and suspicion. Of course, most foreigners came to grab resources or came to conquer. They were either successful and dominated or failed and were either repelled or killed. Conflict would continue until the population was back to relative homogeneity.

In Europe, there were some rare exceptions to this process: the Jews and the Gypsies. People from these cultures came to Europe not to conquer, but as a place of refuge or opportunity. Because the Jews maintained their principles of education and community, and had hard currency as a back-up precaution, they thrived among, but apart from the native populations. They kept their own traditions, their own religion, their own native, and subsequently hybrid, languages. Yet they rose to the top, not just in finance, but in almost every human endeavor: they were, and still are, high achievers (it’s part of being a Jew. Oy, the guilt if you’re not an achiever).

If any foreign population had been substituted for the Jews, they would have run into the same problems that the Jews encountered. Look at Muslims, Africans, and Turks today in Europe (they’re kicking themselves: we got rid of the Jews for this?)

Because of the large numbers of different cultures in the U.S., Jews may only be singled out as a consequence of their high profile successes, notwithstanding their fewer numbers. Generally, though, everyone is suspicious of everyone else – a situation in which we all can take comfort.

Matt Gochman

2.

Arjuna
Toronto, Canada
May 24th, 2011
10:02 am
What the author and thel commentators seem to forget is in the Pew front poll the Hindus took second place to the Jews by a measly 2% in households earning over $75K and actually beat the Jews by 5% or so in the % of college graduates. In other words, both tribes if the Hindus can be called one are more or less equal in education and wealth. The fact that media including the despicable Stormfront and others of that ilk chose to focus only on the Jews is a clear indication of the prevalence of anti-semitism being the clear leader in hate movements. Otherwise the Hindus who are most if not all dark skiined should have come in for an equal share of hate.

 

[roadrunner]

i think you just wanted to state someone mentioned Hindus coming in second to Jews on earnings.

If anyone is "being selective" it's you.

 

[gubbi]

i think you just wanted to state someone mentioned Hindus coming in second to Jews on earnings.

If anyone is "being selective" it's you.

Maybe, maybe not!

Your take has nothing to do with the main article. The fact that Hindus are very similar to the Jews and yet the Jews are being singled out as the "cause for all problems" says a lot about "mentality" of some people.

There are reasons for hatred and then there is a reason for hatred. Its the latter dear.

 

[roadrunner]

So now that you've mentioned that someone mentioned on the internet that Hindus are the second highest earners, there's not much more to talk about (ironic considering how much poverty there is in India).

Great

PS Hindus are nothing like Jews. Both religions are completely different. Hindu influence is virtually nil.

 

[LaBong]

How is Hindus any similar to Jews?

 

[President Camacho]

The last line sums it up... well, second last, to be more precise.

 

[53fd]

Jews aren't inherently bad people. In fact, I have some very close Jewish friends, & being friends for them over the years has made me realize that Judaism is very similar to Islam, in a lot of ways, a lot closer than Christianity is. Most Jews don't even dream of "world supremacy", but there are a very few Jews that are, well let's say "ambitious"; just like there are a few wacko Muslims as well that exploit & tarnish the image of Islam to achieve their goals. Some of the biggest proponents of Palestinian rights are Noam Chomsky & Norman Finkelstein (both of them Jews), not Saudi Arabia.

 

[EjazR]

I'm not sure what the author is intending to say here.

There is a possibility of latent antisemitism among crazy Christians mainly because of the "jews killed Jesus" theory. Just holding present generation guilty for perceived crimes committed by some Jewish priests for possible political reasons. Otherwise, antisemitism is just like any other xenophobic phenomenon.

Then there is criticism of Israeli policies. That is not antisemitism. Just like criticizing Pakistani policies have nothing to do with being Islamaphobic.

Of course there might be loonies who conflate the two but that is because they are loonies.

 

[below_freezing]

Discrimination against Jews is not a problem today.

I don't need to say that in US brainwashed media the typical Chinese isn't Jet Li but William Hung. The fact is, for some of the racist things people say against Chinese, they'd be put in prison if they were said about blacks or Jews.

US's whites and jews are on the same level.

Maybe if we were talking about in Russia, yeah there anti semitism is a problem. But not in the West. In the West, anti Chinese is a problem.

 

[faithfulguy]

Discrimination against Jews is not a problem today.

I don't need to say that in US brainwashed media the typical Chinese isn't Jet Li but William Hung. The fact is, for some of the racist things people say against Chinese, they'd be put in prison if they were said about blacks or Jews.

US's whites and jews are on the same level.

Maybe if we were talking about in Russia, yeah there anti semitism is a problem. But not in the West. In the West, anti Chinese is a problem.

How do you know that anti-Chinese is the problem in the west? Have you lived in the west?

 

[milvipes]

How do you know that anti-Chinese is the problem in the west? Have you lived in the west?

Where in the US have you been living? Because I would really want to go there.
I got so sick and tired of the visceral & almost universal hatred against Asians in the Anglophone world I made the jump to Mexico.

 

[Aramsogo]

1. Notice how the article, which makes absolutely no mention of Indians or Hindus whatsoever, gets an Indian trying to hijack it in the NYTimes editorial comment section. It's not just Indians here I guess, but everywhere.

2. Is there a lot of anti-semitism in China like the article says??

 

[Hammy007]

hindu banyas are famous just like jewish bankers, both lend money on high interest rates, they can even suck blood to their client

second similarity being both hindus and jews remained without a state for centuries, just in 20th century, hindus got a state in 1947 and jews got in 1948

 

[iPakMan]

hindu banyas are famous just like jewish bankers, both lend money on high interest rates, they can even suck blood to their client

second similarity being both hindus and jews remained without a state for centuries, just in 20th century, hindus got a state in 1947 and jews got in 1948

India goes back thousands of years while Pakistan originated from the British colony of India. What is this world`s name you call home?