“Perhaps most significantly, in the name of equality and justice this ideology insists that it is better to have everyone worse off than to be unequal in any way. If some people lose the race, the race must be dismantled.”
This sums up the our country’s policies. Equity trumps all, including the intelligent, mothers, Title 9, parents’ rights, college entry admissions, and the list goes on…. VOTE and speak up!
Bari, your writing and podcasting is first rate, but I think that you whiffed on the Texas Republican Party slogan when you thought it antisemitic. Allen West, the Texas GOP’s newly elected chairman, has said previously that the slogan has no connection to the QAnon theory, and instead comes from a quote he often recites at speaking events: “The devil whispers into the warrior’s ear, ‘You cannot withstand the coming storm.’ The warrior whispers back, ‘I am the storm.’”
I don’t think that Ms. Weiss propounded a principle of equivalence here. Merely, she stated the obvious: that there is antisemitism on both the Right and the Left, albeit not the same kind of antisemitism. The antisemitism of the far Right is more traditional (if that is the word), relying mostly on age-old stereotypes and caricatures. That of the Left, however, is an offshoot of postmodern progressivism, tricked out in the rhetoric of anti-racism, white supremacy, colonialism and so on.
Nor is it fair to say that Ms. Weiss has charged either the Right or the Left as a whole with antisemitism. What come through clearly here is the fact that antisemitism is on the rise not exclusively but mainly on the Left. Antisemitism has next to no presence in the conservative mainstream. But it has a visible and growing presence on the Left—as the career of Ilhan Omar illustrates.
The word “antisemitism” belongs at the place where discrimination is defined or explored or addressed or discussed at Institution X. Do you see or hear the word at your institution? Are you the only person at your institution that speaks or types the word?
Bari, while I agree there are people that hate the jews on the left and the right, it is the far left that is much more vocal and pursuing policies that are anti-jew. The right or conservatives are not doing this in mass. In addition, I would say that not everyone hates the jews. Evangelical Christians are some of the biggest supporters of Israel and the Jews.
We also need to grapple with the issue of Islam in all of this. If anything, the embers of antisemitism have been burning hotter amongst Muslims than anywhere else after WWII. To the point that it's been an almost reflexive belief that somehow Israel, and it's few million Jews, are the dominant reason that their "civilizations" are in the regressive, repressive, backward state that they're in.
Which, of course, is ludicrous when one considers the Muslim world has been in a centuries-long decline that predates Israel, America, and every other boogeyman their countries conjure to deflect blame from their myriad failures to properly educate themselves and modernize.
My rubric (which I admittedly may make mistakes in following, like all of us) is that I'll support the countries that people want to live in over the country they don't. People want to live in America. People want to live in Israel. People want to live in Europe. They're great places that allow for good living, and human progress. Moreover, people who are genuinely oppressed by a country don't climb all over themselves to move to that country. Jews were not moving to Germany in the 1940s, which makes it all the more puzzling that the Muslim world so vociferously speaks against the countries that they just have to move to.
Thank you so much for sharing these horrific incidents, hard as they are to stomach. There seem to be a lot of quarrels in this comment section but you're doing a great mitzvah by uniting Jews at a time when they're increasingly needing it. Some day soon those currently blissfully ignorant will understand that; hopefully not too late.
While the crimes you reported are mostly erased in the media's eyes, we in the underground hub of alternative journalism are all with you.
!_Fellow White People! We must band together to fight Anti-Liberalism_!
Too late, we're just trying to survive ourselves our declared openly Erasure, and Mx. Weiss spent most of her life along with the NYT et al in building the monster that now wants to eat them too.
Bari writes: "Perhaps most significantly, in the name of equality and justice this ideology insists that it is better to have everyone worse off than to be unequal in any way. If some people lose the race, the race must be dismantled."
What she articulates above is exactly what I saw as a child happen in Cuba (and as an adult, in Venezuela): If you can't bring everybody up, then bring everybody down. And it's down, where equality is created.
We are moving into a world of secular fundamentalism that loathes the dialectical, and insists on dogma. And the anti-dialectical is profoundly anti-Semitic. After all, the Talmud is a paragon of dialectics. I have been thinking about that for a few years now and being very afraid for Jews.
That change to the anti-dialectical is an ether, a sensibility. And it will be poisonous for Jews, the intellect, and life itself.
"Perhaps most significantly, in the name of equality and justice this ideology insists that it is better to have everyone worse off than to be unequal in any way."
Sounds like reducing the draw weight on military side arms to allow more people who menstruate to meet minimum markspersonship qualifications 25+ years ago, and continuing apace today in more in more fields and arenas.
"Or when the Texas Republican Party adopted the slogan “We Are the Storm,” an apparent wink to QAnon, which claims that Democrats are sex traffickers who drink the blood of children (a nod to the medieval anti-Semitic libel)."
Nothing like misrepresenting the source of the quote (anonymous and unrelated to QAnon) and following it up with guilt by association with QAnon (which the GOP, and all other sane people have disavowed). Ms. Weiss, you are SO much better than this.
Jews and Asians are disproportionately successful relative to their percentage of the population; thus they are despised by the rabid, fanatical, commie, pagan Left who want utopian 'equity" (read: endless quotas for favored, under-performing groups and purges of allegedly 'advantaged' groups - ya know, like poor Asians in NY...), which in the end just means the destruction of American excellence and the 'leveling' of everyone based on immutable, racial characteristics to advance 'antiracist' (read:racist) nonsense with the end goal of reducing all of society to mediocrity and misery. 2022 can't come fast enough...
The anti-Semitism is shocking. I have lived the vast majority of my nearly 4 decades on Earth with 1 mile of either a Temple or Synagogue. The neighborhoods I have lived in, the friends I grew up with, have been heavily, if not majority Jewish. That said, a large majority of the Jewish people I know support the very people who are promoting anti-Semitism. Based on polls this is true across the US.
Many of my Jewish neighbors, those we called friend until October of 2020, who we drank with and ate with and hung out with in the streets through Covid, saw that I had made a small donation to Trump when the hit lists with maps came out around the election. Those people stopped talking to us, they walk away when we walk down the street, they shake their heads at us, they hate us. They don't care a bit that ne of the REASONS I supported Trump in 2020, and did not (I voted Johnson) in 2016, was the stability he brought to the Middle East, his unwavering support of Israel, and the Abraham Accords. For my support of Trump the Jewish community in which I live would now be largely indifferent, at best, to my family being loaded on a bus and removed from society. Many would cheer that and think we "deserve" it.
Why should I risk everything to defend people who seek my destruction? Why should I risk EVERYTHING to defend people that openly support the very secular ideologies and authoritarians that seeks their destruction? I have not seen a great deal of anti-Semitism in my life, but when I have, I stood up loudly and clearly against it and had unwavering support for Jewish People and the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish country.
What have I gotten in return? The very people I stood up for want my family sent to camps and destroyed.
God helps those who help themselves. Maybe its time for the Jewish community to stop hating Christians, the overwhelming majority of whom believe it is their obligation as Christians to PROTECT Israel and the Jewish Community. Maybe its time for the Jewish community to look at actual outcomes and policies. Instead the vast majority voted against the most pro-Jewish president, who has a Jewish daughter and grandchildren, in my lifetime. The vast majority of the Jewish community is cheering the destruction and censoring of the very people who stand up for them, while supporting those who hate them.
Those of us who are conservatives and oppose authoritarianism might end up on the buses here soon, but the Jews will be right there with us. The biggest difference is we fought for their to be no buses, we are risking everything for there to be NO BUSES for ANYONE. The majority of those in the Jewish community are cheering the buses simply because they are under the false impression they will be loaded with someone else.
“Perhaps most significantly, in the name of equality and justice this ideology insists that it is better to have everyone worse off than to be unequal in any way. If some people lose the race, the race must be dismantled.”
This sums up the our country’s policies. Equity trumps all, including the intelligent, mothers, Title 9, parents’ rights, college entry admissions, and the list goes on…. VOTE and speak up!
Bari, your writing and podcasting is first rate, but I think that you whiffed on the Texas Republican Party slogan when you thought it antisemitic. Allen West, the Texas GOP’s newly elected chairman, has said previously that the slogan has no connection to the QAnon theory, and instead comes from a quote he often recites at speaking events: “The devil whispers into the warrior’s ear, ‘You cannot withstand the coming storm.’ The warrior whispers back, ‘I am the storm.’”
I don’t think that Ms. Weiss propounded a principle of equivalence here. Merely, she stated the obvious: that there is antisemitism on both the Right and the Left, albeit not the same kind of antisemitism. The antisemitism of the far Right is more traditional (if that is the word), relying mostly on age-old stereotypes and caricatures. That of the Left, however, is an offshoot of postmodern progressivism, tricked out in the rhetoric of anti-racism, white supremacy, colonialism and so on.
Nor is it fair to say that Ms. Weiss has charged either the Right or the Left as a whole with antisemitism. What come through clearly here is the fact that antisemitism is on the rise not exclusively but mainly on the Left. Antisemitism has next to no presence in the conservative mainstream. But it has a visible and growing presence on the Left—as the career of Ilhan Omar illustrates.
Your brilliant essay got it right, Bari Weiss. The avalanche of anti-Semitism is coming from both the right and the left. In other words, everywhere.
The word “antisemitism” belongs at the place where discrimination is defined or explored or addressed or discussed at Institution X. Do you see or hear the word at your institution? Are you the only person at your institution that speaks or types the word?
Bari, while I agree there are people that hate the jews on the left and the right, it is the far left that is much more vocal and pursuing policies that are anti-jew. The right or conservatives are not doing this in mass. In addition, I would say that not everyone hates the jews. Evangelical Christians are some of the biggest supporters of Israel and the Jews.
Hey, look what I found. Teachers spewing anti-Semitic garbage. And they hope to educate other on this subject too. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-09-23/l-a-teachers-union-israel-palestinian-conflict
We also need to grapple with the issue of Islam in all of this. If anything, the embers of antisemitism have been burning hotter amongst Muslims than anywhere else after WWII. To the point that it's been an almost reflexive belief that somehow Israel, and it's few million Jews, are the dominant reason that their "civilizations" are in the regressive, repressive, backward state that they're in.
Which, of course, is ludicrous when one considers the Muslim world has been in a centuries-long decline that predates Israel, America, and every other boogeyman their countries conjure to deflect blame from their myriad failures to properly educate themselves and modernize.
My rubric (which I admittedly may make mistakes in following, like all of us) is that I'll support the countries that people want to live in over the country they don't. People want to live in America. People want to live in Israel. People want to live in Europe. They're great places that allow for good living, and human progress. Moreover, people who are genuinely oppressed by a country don't climb all over themselves to move to that country. Jews were not moving to Germany in the 1940s, which makes it all the more puzzling that the Muslim world so vociferously speaks against the countries that they just have to move to.
Bari,
Thank you so much for sharing these horrific incidents, hard as they are to stomach. There seem to be a lot of quarrels in this comment section but you're doing a great mitzvah by uniting Jews at a time when they're increasingly needing it. Some day soon those currently blissfully ignorant will understand that; hopefully not too late.
While the crimes you reported are mostly erased in the media's eyes, we in the underground hub of alternative journalism are all with you.
Anti-Whiteness? Good!
Erase Whiteness? OK, double plus good.
>Wait...Jews are White!?!?
!_Fellow White People! We must band together to fight Anti-Liberalism_!
Too late, we're just trying to survive ourselves our declared openly Erasure, and Mx. Weiss spent most of her life along with the NYT et al in building the monster that now wants to eat them too.
Bari writes: "Perhaps most significantly, in the name of equality and justice this ideology insists that it is better to have everyone worse off than to be unequal in any way. If some people lose the race, the race must be dismantled."
What she articulates above is exactly what I saw as a child happen in Cuba (and as an adult, in Venezuela): If you can't bring everybody up, then bring everybody down. And it's down, where equality is created.
We are moving into a world of secular fundamentalism that loathes the dialectical, and insists on dogma. And the anti-dialectical is profoundly anti-Semitic. After all, the Talmud is a paragon of dialectics. I have been thinking about that for a few years now and being very afraid for Jews.
That change to the anti-dialectical is an ether, a sensibility. And it will be poisonous for Jews, the intellect, and life itself.
"Perhaps most significantly, in the name of equality and justice this ideology insists that it is better to have everyone worse off than to be unequal in any way."
Sounds like reducing the draw weight on military side arms to allow more people who menstruate to meet minimum markspersonship qualifications 25+ years ago, and continuing apace today in more in more fields and arenas.
"Or when the Texas Republican Party adopted the slogan “We Are the Storm,” an apparent wink to QAnon, which claims that Democrats are sex traffickers who drink the blood of children (a nod to the medieval anti-Semitic libel)."
Nothing like misrepresenting the source of the quote (anonymous and unrelated to QAnon) and following it up with guilt by association with QAnon (which the GOP, and all other sane people have disavowed). Ms. Weiss, you are SO much better than this.
Jews and Asians are disproportionately successful relative to their percentage of the population; thus they are despised by the rabid, fanatical, commie, pagan Left who want utopian 'equity" (read: endless quotas for favored, under-performing groups and purges of allegedly 'advantaged' groups - ya know, like poor Asians in NY...), which in the end just means the destruction of American excellence and the 'leveling' of everyone based on immutable, racial characteristics to advance 'antiracist' (read:racist) nonsense with the end goal of reducing all of society to mediocrity and misery. 2022 can't come fast enough...
The anti-Semitism is shocking. I have lived the vast majority of my nearly 4 decades on Earth with 1 mile of either a Temple or Synagogue. The neighborhoods I have lived in, the friends I grew up with, have been heavily, if not majority Jewish. That said, a large majority of the Jewish people I know support the very people who are promoting anti-Semitism. Based on polls this is true across the US.
Many of my Jewish neighbors, those we called friend until October of 2020, who we drank with and ate with and hung out with in the streets through Covid, saw that I had made a small donation to Trump when the hit lists with maps came out around the election. Those people stopped talking to us, they walk away when we walk down the street, they shake their heads at us, they hate us. They don't care a bit that ne of the REASONS I supported Trump in 2020, and did not (I voted Johnson) in 2016, was the stability he brought to the Middle East, his unwavering support of Israel, and the Abraham Accords. For my support of Trump the Jewish community in which I live would now be largely indifferent, at best, to my family being loaded on a bus and removed from society. Many would cheer that and think we "deserve" it.
Why should I risk everything to defend people who seek my destruction? Why should I risk EVERYTHING to defend people that openly support the very secular ideologies and authoritarians that seeks their destruction? I have not seen a great deal of anti-Semitism in my life, but when I have, I stood up loudly and clearly against it and had unwavering support for Jewish People and the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish country.
What have I gotten in return? The very people I stood up for want my family sent to camps and destroyed.
God helps those who help themselves. Maybe its time for the Jewish community to stop hating Christians, the overwhelming majority of whom believe it is their obligation as Christians to PROTECT Israel and the Jewish Community. Maybe its time for the Jewish community to look at actual outcomes and policies. Instead the vast majority voted against the most pro-Jewish president, who has a Jewish daughter and grandchildren, in my lifetime. The vast majority of the Jewish community is cheering the destruction and censoring of the very people who stand up for them, while supporting those who hate them.
Those of us who are conservatives and oppose authoritarianism might end up on the buses here soon, but the Jews will be right there with us. The biggest difference is we fought for their to be no buses, we are risking everything for there to be NO BUSES for ANYONE. The majority of those in the Jewish community are cheering the buses simply because they are under the false impression they will be loaded with someone else.
I have a gun and I encourage all Jews who can to arm themselves and get training. Let's at least go down fighting next time.