As per usual, @uppittynegress nails it. There's another point, too. People who call secular or non-religious Jews "fake Jews" have no understanding of antisemitism or the history of Jews. Antisemitism isn't based on religion. It's based on a racial view...
of Jews. I mean, far be it from me to tell Mr. Weeks what antisemitism means, given that he's so good at it but he's a natural. For Hitler, being Jewish was defined as having 1 jewish grandparent. The Nazis didn't care if you practiced Judaism. That was beside the point. Now...
people may push back and say "how dare you let Hitler define you," or "race is a social construct." Well, race is a social construct and meaningless and racism is real, right? Same for Jews. And I'm not equating being a Jew with being Black. I'm just referring to the tension...
between the realness of racism and the construction of race. But, also, you're going to tell me that Larry David or Woody Allen are fake Jews? Because they're not religious. And I'm pretty sure they're Jewish. They're very Jewy. They're very much part of a Jewish identity &...
culture that is either atheist, agnostic, areligious or anti-religious. Freud, @SarahKSilverman, Albert Einstein, @marcmaron, Franz Kafka, Phillip Roth, Primo Levy, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg, Yitzhak Rabin, Stephen Jay Gould, Amos Oz, are...
all Jews who are either agnostic, atheist, secular or some combo. Also Karl Marx was pretty Jewy. He converted. When Anderson Cooper accused Sanders of hiding his Judaism (by which he meant Jewishness) I laughed. As if Sanders COULD hide it even if he wanted to. Though, to be...
fair, there are people who don't have Jewdar. It's actually extremely consistent with Jewish religion to be agnostic because the torah/ old testament is so steeped in skepticism and questioning. It's very rabbinical to not really know if you believe in god. But anyway, that's...
neither here nor there. The point is that, yes, you can not practice judaism and be Jewish. The idea that your not practicing Judaism makes you a fake Jew is stupid. There are people who sincerely and in good faith don't understand how someone can be Jewish without being...
religious and I get that. But Mr. Weeks is a hateful antisemite (& I do not throw that word around lightly at all. 9 times out of 10 when i say the words antisemite it's in the context of saying someone is *not* an antisemite, bc it's so weaponized to stifle critics of Israel)...
So there's genuine "i don't get how people can be jewish and not religious" & then there's disgusting, hateful, insensitive and totally out of your lane #GoySplaining. For me, growing up on the UWS, the time I did, being Jewish wasn't a thing. I didn't even identify as Jewish...
until I left NY for college, studied abroad in Spain where I was asked if I was protestant or Catholic, and realized how culturally Jewish my family, especially my mom's side, is. That cultural Jewishness consists of an accent, a political orientation, an outlook, an embrace...
of socialist internationalism. It's the kind of Jewish identity where it was much more Jewish for my uncle to marry and have kids with a woman whose last name is Doolittle (which, in case you couldn't tell is not Jewish, though it kinda sounds like a diminutive Yiddish word)...
Because both Eric (Ricky) Eisenberg and Sarah Doolittle shared a secular upbringing and shared politics and relatives who fought in the Spanish Civil War. And it was much more our kind of Jewish for my uncle to marry her than it would have been to marry a religious Jew. THAT...
would have been an interfaith marriage. And my aunt loves Passover & sings Yiddish Partisan songs. But, speaking of my mom and my uncle, they didn't have a choice about identifying as Jewish. The neighborhood Bronx Irish Catholic school kids (#notAllIrish) would throw rocks...
at them. It didn't matter that they didn't go to synagogue. They went to schule, a Yiddish secular kind of Hebrew School equivalent but the Irish American kids didn't know that. They just knew their name was Eisenberg. And that was enough. I gotta go to sleep but something that..
we have to talk about is what antisemitism means today. The person who murdered 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue didn't choose that synagogue randomly; he chose it because it was a place of Jewish worship AND of tikkun olam, Hebrew for "repair the world" & kind of...
Jewish social justice. The irony is that sometimes I feel like anti-semites understand my Jewish identity more than other Jews who don't get how I'm Jewish. The suspected gunman Robert Bowers was fixated on HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) which... newyorker.com/news/our-colum…
supports refugees from all over the world. They had sponsored a "National Refugee Shabbat" which hundreds of congregations in the U.S. & Canada participated in. One of them was Dor Hadash which met in the Tree of Life building in Pittsburg. Bowers wrote... religionnews.com/2018/10/29/pit…
a post which linked to the National Refugee Shabbat and said, "Why hello there hias! You like to bring in hostile invaders to dwell among us?” He also wrote that he "appreciated" that HIAS posted a list of participating synagogues. Hours before the... religionnews.com/2018/10/29/pit…
the shooting, Bowers wrote, "“hias likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” He had also written on another date, “Open you Eyes! It’s the filthy evil jews Bringing the Filthy evil...
Muslims into the Country!!” The point is a synagogue is an easy target for an anti-semite. But for this anti-semite, it was as much about the politics of the Jews he wanted to kill as it was about their religion. I'm not pretending religious Jews aren't in themselves targets...
of antisemitism. The easiest way to find/ identify and attack Jews is by going to a synagogue or looking for people in religious garb. But it's telling that for Bowers & many antisemites, one of the things they find most reprehensible about Jews is what they would call a...
zionist conspiracy to undermine America & American values, and what some of us would call a particular Jewish strain of internationalism & solidarity. Neither of these things is unique to jews. Nor are all Jews part of this strain. But there is a history of universalism that...
exists for various, mostly historical reasons related to living in diaspora, though some argue that it stems from the actual text, but if that were the case, all Christians would be pacifist (at least 90% of the time). But I digress. Kinda. Antisemites hate Jews for being Jews...
AND for being overrepresented in the International Brigades that fought Franco and sought to stop Nazism & fascism. They were called premature anti-fascists, actually. The American brigade was called The Abraham Lincoln Brigade but the most commonly spoken language among the...
International Brigades was Yiddish. They were over-represented in the Civil Rights movement (among non-Black people, obviously). They've been over-represented in the labor movement. By the way, when I say over-represented I mean this in a good way. This isn't some kind of...
accusation. I just kind of LOL'd imagining someone lecturing a Jew in Spain during the Spanish Civil War that they needed to show up and leave space for Spaniards. overbearing men/white/Jewish people is a thing but it's not what I'm talking about here at all. I'm not a...
Jewish chauvinist. Jews aren't better than any other group. I'm critical of Israel. The occupation is illegal, criminal, and brutal while pretending to be a beacon of democracy in a sea of Muslim savagery. It's disgusting. I'm well aware that racism exists among Jews. But 1 of...
the things I'm proud to be part of or descended from culturally and politically is a the very thing people like Bowers revile. George Soros isn't funding the so-called caravans. That's an anti-semitic trope of rich Jews (of which he is definitely one) running the show behind...
the scenes. I didn't really think this was where my thread was going but I guess I'm kind of saying that the Jewish things I identify with and take pride in (in other words, a history of solidarity & internationalism & social justice, not, say, neurosis) are also the things...
that anti-semites hate and will kill over. And it's a really clear example of why we can't see various forms of violence and oppression as unrelated. I'm not equating being Jewish with being Black and/or Muslim/ and/or a Central American refugee. At all. I walk down the street...
with no fear of being identified or targeted as a Jew. It's not comparable but it's related. And we are our brothers (and sisters) keepers.
Ugh. I ended on such a corny and apostrophe-missing note. I will just say that solidarity & allyship are often framed in terms of survival not in just ethically, moral or justice terms. But I think it’s easy to forget how it really is about survival. The moral & ethical stuff...
Is there and important. And solidarity doesn’t require an immediate or direct self interest. Being guided by a sense of justice and empathy and compassion and righteous anger is legit. But it just so happens that nativism, xenophobia, racism, antisemitism are really really...
really related in ways that are simple and obvious and also ways that are kind of nuanced and not immediately apparent.
